Free The Cutout by Francine Mathews Page B

he’ll say he knows nothing about electronics. He’s just a carpenter with a German wife and a kid named Moammar.”
    “Aren’t they all. I guess the phone number wasn’t his, or it’d be in the file.”
    “The phone is disconnected. I walked down to the Exxon station on Chain Bridge Road twenty minutes ago and dialed it.”
    “So if it’s not Sharif’s …”
    “It’s Michael O’Shaughnessy’s. Got it in one.” Hepulled up a chair next to her. “Last August, Sharif was shaken down by Israeli airport security when he tried to fly from Frankfurt to Malta. They pulled his address book, Xeroxed it, and sent the contents here. Somebody—a Career Trainee, probably, who never heard of Michael O’Shaughnessy and couldn’t have known it was an Agency alias—entered the name into the database.”
    “We don’t know how old this information is,” Caroline hedged. “People keep numbers in their black books for years. Maybe Eric made legitimate contact with Sharif years ago. Maybe he targeted him for recruitment.”
    “It was a datebook, Caroline. Sharif bought it last January. Nothing in there is less than current. He talked to Eric sometime this year. And that disconnected phone was in Berlin.”
    “You think they planned this,” she said. “That Eric was in Berlin and recruited Sharif to build the device that took out the Gate. Why, Cuddy? Why would a Palestinian do anything for a neo-Nazi like Krucevic?”
    “Who said it was Krucevic? All I saw was Eric in a helicopter. Anyone could have been flying it, Caroline. You know that.”
    “But, Cuddy—”
    “It could have been anybody,” he interrupted. “We won’t know who snatched the Veep until they make contact. And once they do—whether it’s Osama bin Laden or Hizballah or, yes, 30 April—the FBI will be in charge of the investigation.”
    “You just want this whole thing to go away, don’t you?” Her voice was brittle with frustration.
    “Of course!” he burst out. “Isn’t that what any sane person would want? Or have you had the time ofyour life today, Carrie, hiding in the women’s bathroom?”
    “I’m sorry,” she said inadequately.
    “Don’t hope for good things, Mad Dog. They’re just not thick on the ground.”

NINE
Prague, 5:52 P.M.
    M RS. PAYNE .”
    A harsh voice, faintly mocking. Sophie turned her hooded head and groped vainly for a face. A piercing light penetrated the cloth masking her eyes; nothing else did.
    “Help the lady out, Michael.”
    A firm pair of hands under her armpits, and she was hoisted free of the box in which she had traveled now for unreckoned hours. She groaned at the bruising pain of it; her tethered wrists, pulled obscenely behind her back, had gone numb.
    The unseen Michael half thrust, half carried her along a smooth surface, probably concrete. A pathway— toward what, exactly?—cold and pitted under her stockinged feet. She was still wearing the suit she had chosen for the embassy inaugural.
    It must be spattered with Nell Forsyte’s blood. Sophie’s throat tightened, torn between the desire to retch and the need to sob. Nell was dead. She, Sophie, was alive. That should have been comforting—butSophie was no fool. The men who had abducted her would attempt to bargain for her life. And much as he liked and respected her, the President would never negotiate with terrorists.
    The air was sharp and chill. She felt the weak sunlight fade, had a palpable sense of passing indoors. A short, stumbling flight of stairs, a stubbed toe. Her son Peter’s laugh rang suddenly in her ears—infectious, still young, the faintest edge of her dead husband in its timbre. What did Peter know of her fate? Was he frantically calling the White House, demanding information— leaving New Haven on an afternoon train, with just an ATM card in his pocket?
    She was thrust abruptly into a straight-backed chair; they left her that way for an instant. Then the hood was pulled off, charging her hair with static