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  Praise for

  THE CUTOUT

  “MATHEWS DISHES UP A VERY SCARY TALE OF INTRIGUE AND ESPIONAGE.…THE THRILLS IN THIS BOOK ARE IN ALL THE REALISTIC DETAILS. MATHEWS IS A FORMER CIA ANALYST WHO’S ABLE TO TRANSLATE HER EXPERTISE INTO A HIGH-ACTION THRILLER THAT KICKS OFF IN A LIVELY FASHION. CARMICHAEL IS ONE OF THE TOUGHEST FEMALE SECRET AGENTS WE’VE SEEN IN A LONG TIME. NO WONDER HER NICKNAME IS MAD DOG.”

  —USA TODAY

  “RIVETING … [Mathews’s] presentation of espionage and CIA tactics is impeccable.

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Francine Mathews’s The Cutout is not just a fresh new voice in international intrigue, it’s a brand-new vision—INTELLIGENT, PASSIONATE, AND UNCEASINGLY ENTERTAINING.”

  — Stephen White, New York Times bestselling author of The Program

  “Francine Mathews writes with precision and authority. The Cutout is A TOP-RATE SPY THRILLER. I loved it.”

  — Ridley Pearson, New York Times bestselling author of Middle of Nowhere

  MORE PRAISE FOR FRANCINE MATHEWS’S

  THE CUTOUT

  “Mathews … hits the mark with The Cutout, an espionage tale that satisfies history and spy enthusiasts as well as politicos and action-adventure readers…. The book excels where most others stumble into stereotypes. The Cutout will engage readers of both genders in the secret world of espionage and the quest for vindication, lost love and fallen agents…. OUTSTANDING.”

  —Las Vegas Magazine

  “Former CIA analyst Francine Mathews brings a real knowledge of the world of espionage to this international thriller…. Told with JUST THE RIGHT MIX OF INTER-OFFICE INTRIGUE AND HIGH-STAKES DRAMA.”

  —The Detroit News

  “Intense … an ending that will leave you

  screaming for more … THE HOTTEST READ

  OF THE SEASON.”

  —Romantic Times

  “Tightly written … [Mathews]

  appears to have hit it big with The Cutout.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “The plot is DIZZYING … a plot I definitely had to read in one sitting!”

  —Booknews

  “An exciting espionage thriller … The story line from the outset is fast-paced, never slows down even during an insider’s look at the spy school training program, and ends with an exhilarating climax … BRILLIANT.”

  —The Midwest Book Review

  “Fast-paced … crisp, intelligent.”

  —The Toronto Sun

  Mysteries by Francine Mathews

  Featuring Merry Folger

  DEATH IN A COLD HARD LIGHT

  DEATH IN THE OFF-SEASON

  DEATH IN ROUGH WATER

  DEATH IN A MOOD INDIGO

  and

  The Jane Austen Mystery Series by Francine Mathews

  Writing as Stephanie Barron

  JANE AND THE UNPLEASANTNESS

  AT SCAR GRAVE MANOR

  JANE AND THE MAN OF THE CLOTH

  JANE AND THE WANDERING EYE

  JANE AND THE GENIUS OF THE PLACE

  JANE AND THE STILLROOM MAID

  JANE AND THE PRISONER

  OF WOOL HOUSE

  This book is dedicated with love to Rafe Sagalyn,

  literary agent and friend,

  who made me write it;

  and to Barbara, the original Mad Dog.

  I’d never have survived the Farm without you.

  Cutout: A third person used to conceal the contact between two people—usually an agent and a handler who do not want to meet because one or both may be under surveillance.

  —NORMAN POLMAR AND THOMAS B. ALLEN,

  The Encyclopedia of Espionage

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A tour through the Intelligence world is marked by a series of rituals. There is the initiation of the polygraph; the rite of passage that is tradecraft training; the ceremonial presentation of the first Certificate of Merit or presidential stickpin. And upon exiting, there is the moment when one is required to sign an oath of secrecy. That oath obligated me to submit The Cutout to the CIA’s Publications Review Board, which is charged with removing classified material from text written by former employees. The board reviewed this work in both draft and final manuscript form, and I would like to thank them for their thoroughness, expediency, and professionalism—and for requesting me to change only one word.

  The Cutout would never have seen the light of publication without the intelligent editing and heartfelt encouragement of Kate Miciak, vice president and executive editor of Bantam Dell Books. I have worked with Ms. Miciak for years now, on a variety of novels, but never have I valued her skill and dedication so much as in the present instance.

  I would also like to express my deep gratitude to Dale and Linda Lovin, formerly of the FBI, and to Paul Gray, Chief of FAA Security at Denver International Airport. Their professional advice and willingness to assist a writer who was sometimes out of her depth were invaluable. Any errors unwittingly committed in the translation of their facts to fiction must be considered entirely my own.

  My final word of thanks must go to all those women and men of the CIA who trained, befriended, and inspired me, and to my family, who endured my moods and temper during the long months required for this book’s completion.

  Part I

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 9

  ONE

  Berlin, 12:03 P.M.

  SHE WAS A SMALL WOMAN; the press had always made much of that. On this crisp November morning in the last days of a bloody century, she stood tiptoe on a platform designed to lift her within sight of the crowd. They were a polyglot mass—threadbare German students, Central Europeans, a smattering of American tourists. A few Turks holding bloodred placards were shadowed, of course, by the ubiquitous security detail of the new regime. After twenty-four hours in Berlin, Sophie Payne had grown accustomed to the presence of riot police.

  The international press corps jostled her audience freely, cameras held high like religious icons. The new German chancellor had not yet banned the media. Just across Pariser Platz, at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, sat a tangle of television vans and satellite dishes. Sophie surveyed them from her podium and understood that she was making history. The first American Vice President to descend upon the new German capital of Berlin, she had appeared at a troubled time. The people gathered in the square expected her to deliver an American message—the promise of solidarity in struggle. Or perhaps redemption?

  She had come to Berlin at the request of her President, Jack Bigelow, to inaugurate a foothold in the capital. Behind her, to the rear of the seats held down by the German foreign minister and the U.S. ambassador, the new embassy rose like an operatic set. Before it, Sophie Payne might have been a marionette, Judy playing without Punch, an official government doll.

  The U.S. embassy’s design had been fiercely debated for years. The trick, it seemed, was to avoid all visual reference to Berlin’s twentieth century—that unfortunate period of persistent guilt and klaxons in the night. Comparison with the present regime might prove unfortunate. But neither was the nineteenth century entirely acceptable; that had produced Bismarck, after all, and the march toward German militarism. The State Department planners had settled at last on a postmodernist compromise: a smooth, three-storied expanse of limestone corniced like a Chippendale highboy.

  It might, Sophie thought, have been a corporate headquarters. It made no statement of any kind. That was probably her job today, too.

  But in the last thirty-six hours she had read the obscene graffiti scrawled on the new Holocaust memorial. She had met with third-generation Turkish “guest workers”—gastarbeiters —about to be repatriated to a country they had never seen. She had even dined with the new chancellor, Fritz Voekl, and applauded politel
y when he spoke of the rebirth of German greatness. Then she had lain sleepless far into the night, remembering her parents. And decided that a statement must be made.

  Now she set aside her carefully crafted speech and adjusted the mike. “Meine Damen una Herren.”

  In the pause that followed her amplified words, Sophie distinctly heard a child wailing. She drew breath and gripped the podium.

  “We come here today to celebrate a new capital for a new century,” she said. That was innocuous enough; it might have been drawn from the sanitized pages she had just discarded.

  “We celebrate, too, the dedication and sacrifice of generations of men and women, on both sides of the Atlantic, who committed their lives to the defeat of Communism.” Nothing to argue with there—nothing that might excite the black-clad police or their waiting truncheons.

  “But the fact that we do so today in the city of Berlin is worthy of particular attention,” she continued. “The capital of Germany’s past as well as her future, Berlin can never be wholly reborn. It carries its history in every stone of its streets. For Berlin witnessed Hitler’s tyranny and horror, and Berlin paid for its sins in blood. As we dedicate this embassy, let us commit ourselves to one proposition: that never again will this nation submit to dictatorship. Never again will it shut its doors to any race. Berlin must be the capital for all Germany’s people.”

  There was a tremendous roar—spontaneous, uplifting, and utterly foolhardy—from the crowd in the middle of Pariser Platz. A bearded figure waved his placard, chanting in a torrent of Turkish; he was followed by others, scattered throughout the square, and in an instant the police truncheons descended in a savage arc. Someone screamed. Sophie took a step back from the podium; she saw a woman crumple under the feet of the crowd.

  Nell Forsyte, her Secret Service agent, was instantly at her side. “Say thank you and get out,” Nell muttered.

  Sophie reached for the microphone. And before the sound of the blast ripped through the cries swelling from Pariser Platz, she felt something—a vibration in the wooden platform beneath her feet, as though the old square sighed once before giving up its ghost. Then the Brandenburg Gate bloomed like a monstrous stone flower and the screaming began—a thin, high shriek piercing the chaos. A wave of red light boiled toward the podium where she stood, paralyzed, and she thought, Good God. It’s a bomb. Did I do that?

  Nell Forsyte flung Sophie to the platform like a rag doll and lay heavily on her back, a human shield shouting unintelligible orders. Somewhere quite close, a man cried out in French. Glass shattered as the shock wave slammed outward; the plate-glass windows of the luxury hotels buckled, the casements of a dozen tour buses popped like caramelized sugar. And then, with all the violence of a Wagnerian chorus, the massive glass dome of the nearby Reichstag splintered and crashed inward.

  The chaos suspended thought and feeling. For an instant, Sophie breathed outside of time.

  “You okay?” Nell demanded hoarsely in her ear.

  She nodded, and her forehead struck the wooden platform. “Get off my back, Nell. You’re killing me.”

  “Stay down.”

  “I’d prefer to get up.”

  The Secret Service agent ignored her, but Sophie felt a slight shifting in the woman’s weight; Nell was craning her neck to scan the square. Sophie had a momentary vision of a pile of dignitaries—American, German—all crushed beneath their respective security details. She giggled. It was an ugly sound, halfway between a sob and a gasp. If I could just get up, I’d feel better. More in control. She dug an elbow into Nell’s ribs.

  The agent grunted. “When I count to three, stand up and face the embassy. I’ll cover your back.”

  “Shouldn’t we crawl?”

  “Too much glass.”

  Nell gave the count and heaved Sophie to her feet. Only then did the Vice President notice that she’d lost a shoe. All around her, men and women lay on the platform amid splatters of blood, a hail of glass. The podium, Sophie realized, had miraculously shielded her from shrapnel. A tense ring of German security men surrounded the foreign minister; he sprawled motionless amid a heap of splintered chairs. Somebody—the embassy doctor, Sophie thought—was tearing open his shirt.

  At the right side of the platform, maybe a yard from where she stood, a dark-skinned scowling man drew a machine gun from his coat and aimed it at Sophie.

  She stared at him, fascinated.

  Then Nell’s pistol popped and the man’s left eye welled crimson. He reeled like a drunk, his gun discharging in the air.

  This time, Nell tackled her at the knees.

  The medevac helicopter circled over Pariser Platz twice, ignoring the frantic signal of an ambulance crew from the rubble below. There was nowhere to land; survivors trampled the wounded underfoot, and the main exits to the Tiergarten and Unter den Linden were choked with tumbled stone and rescue vehicles. The chopper pilot veered sharply left and hovered over the roof of the embassy. Normally, a marine guard would have been posted there for the duration of the Vice President’s speech, but the soldiers had probably rushed below in the first seconds after the explosion. The roof was empty. The pilot found the bull’s-eye of the landing pad and set down the craft.

  A two-man team scuttled out of the chopper, backs bent under the wind of the blades. They rolled a white-sheeted gurney between them. A third man—blond-haired, black-jacketed—crouched in the craft’s open doorway. He covered the team with an automatic rifle until they reached the rooftop door. There, one of the men drew a snub-nosed submachine gun from his white lab coat and fired at the communications antennae bolted to the embassy roof. Then he blew the lock off the door.

  A security alarm blared immediately. It was drowned in the clamor of Pariser Platz.

  The blond-haired man raised his gun and glanced over his shoulder at the helicopter pilot. “They’re in. Give them three minutes.” He scanned the rooftop, the heating ducts and the forest of defunct antennae. Brand-new, state-of-the-art listening posts, all shot to hell in seconds. The CIA techies had probably been there for weeks installing them.

  The helicopter rotors whined, and the man in the black jacket steadied himself against the door frame as the craft lifted into the air. The screams below seemed hardly to affect him. He scanned the square like a hawk, waiting for the moment to dive.

  Machine-gun fire. It was the sound of her recurring nightmare—a dream about execution and a firing squad. Sophie struggled in Nell’s grip, choking on the wave of oily smoke that had flooded Pariser Platz. It was impossible to see much—only the blank wall of the embassy looming. The agent lifted her under the armpits like a child.

  “We’ve got to get inside.” Nell thrust Sophie toward the dignitaries’ chairs, vacant now as a theater on a bad opening night, shards of glass sparkling everywhere. Sophie could feel Nell’s urgency nipping at her heels.

  A marine guard thrust open the shattered main door. Then he fell, slack-mouthed and startled, dead at Sophie’s feet. Nell’s arm came up beside her. The agent fired at something in the shadows of the entryway And then, with a sound like a punctured tire, Nell dropped to her knees. There had been no report from another gun. Someone inside the embassy had a silencer.

  A clatter of footsteps, a gurney being lifted over the marine guard’s corpse. Blood was spreading rapidly across the dark blue wool of Nell’s suit. A rescue team in white coats surged toward Sophie, and she sank down beside the agent with a feeling of relief. Nell grabbed Sophie’s waist with one arm and with the other raised her gun. As Sophie watched, a bullet struck the agent square in the forehead and she slumped over, rage still blazing in her eyes.

  Sophie was cradling her, a dragging, bleeding weight, and screaming Nell, Nell, when they seized her from behind. Then night fell like the guttering of a candle flame.

  “Get out of the way!”

  The man at the head of the gurney shouted in German to the bewildered survivors at the edge of the platform. “We need room! Move it!”

  The m
edevac helicopter hovered two hundred yards above Pariser Platz, a gurney line descending from the motorized reel. It took only seconds for the two men below to attach the stretcher. It rose slowly, smoothly, with its white-sheeted burden. A figure appeared through the swirling maelstrom of smoke—black leather jacket, blond head. He reached for the stretcher, steadied it, and swung it carefully inside.

  A German newsman, his face smeared with soot, had his lens trained firmly on the chopper. Where it gripped the video cam, his right hand was slick with blood. “Who’s on the stretcher?” he demanded.

  The gurney team ignored him.

  The newsman swung his camera into the face of one of the medical techs. Livid with anger, the man shoved it aside. The reporter dropped the camera with a cry of pain and clutched his wounded hand.

  Shedding their white coats, now stained with blood and dust, the two men pushed through the crowd. An ambulance idled at the edge of the Tiergarten, strangely unresponsive to the hundreds of wounded in the square. They made for it at a run.

  TWO

  Arlington,7 A.M.

  CAROLINE CARMICHAEL BALANCED her coffee cup—an oversized piece of Italian pottery with Deruta stamped on the bottom—between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. Her gaze was fixed on the dull blue wing of a jay carping beyond her window. She may have seen the bird—may have recorded something of its petulance, the way its beak stabbed angrily at the sodden leaves. She may have acknowledged the rain streaming down into the defeated grass, and in some hollow of her mind determined which suit to wear to work; but for the moment she was content to sit nude beneath her oversized terry-cloth robe. It enfolded her like an ermine, a second skin. It had once belonged to Eric, and that alone made it precious.

  The cotton loops smelled faintly of lemons. She closed her eyes and imagined him breathing.