The Last Spymaster (25 page)

“What you’re saying is you want your life to mean something to
you
again.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s a different truth.”

“Fair enough.” His wrath was easing. “This isn’t about proving I’m better than anyone thinks. Frankly, I’d rather you weren’t here, although you’ve shown you have your uses. But if we don’t come to some kind of agreement, I’ll have to drop you off, and the chances are good Jerry will find and scrub you. Or I’ll let you stay, and something will happen, but you’ll be in the way and get hurt because I can’t trust you enough to inform you fully. This is my roundabout way of saying I’d like you to work with me instead of against me. At least until this mess is cleaned up. Another truce.”

She remembered his file, everything she had learned about him. He not only manipulated human frailty, he used it as a lethal weapon. His “warmth and compassion” were “unusually persuasive,” and he “steeped himself in every detail” of his target until the target “began to believe he cared.”
B
efriend.
A
ssess.
R
ecruit. Then he owned you, or he did his damnedest to make sure you believed he did.

As soon as the light turned green, she hit the gas pedal, sending the Jaguar off again into the night.

Time passed. He waited patiently.

Finally she said neutrally, “You’re asking a lot.”

“Goddammit, Elaine!” he exploded. “If you still think you’re going to capture me or get away long enough to report me, you’re crazy! In the first place, you can count on Jerry’s dirty pal inside the government—inside Langley, is my guess—already being on the alert for any contact from you. In the second place, there’s no way they can let you live now, even if you and I aren’t together. You’ve seen too much. There’s no choice—they’ve got to scrub you. Here’s the hard truth: I don’t have time for a prisoner. Either you pull your weight, or I’ve got to get rid of you. Something big is going down.
Huge.
Someone needs to find out what that is!”

“I don’t have a lot of reason to trust you.” They would soon pass the outskirts of Fairfax Station. Still on track to the meet.

“I could easily have left you to Jerry’s ‘tender mercies’ at your town house. I could’ve personally wiped you long ago.”

“Okay, then. Let’s run a test. Tell me about your escape. Allenwood’s a fortress—more security than a beehive has stings. But when you slipped
out, no one noticed. Your dossier shows you habitually premeditate and plan carefully. But you were a recluse in prison, except for the occasional communication with your lawyer. I’m inclined to think you found an angel—or a devil—inside.”

He raised an eyebrow. “When you’re undercover, you can’t be sure when you’ll need a safety net. Someday your life may depend on it. Decades ago, I set up small numbered accounts. Completely secret. I suggest you do the same.”

“We had satellite photos of Allenwood. You were never outdoors.”

“Ah, yes. But if one moves from a building’s loading door into a van’s door in one step, one is exposed to overhead observation only a fraction of a second. And if one wears the driver’s cap, there’s no red flag to draw IMINT’s attention.”

She scowled. “There’s a reason you escaped when you did—not next week or next month. It couldn’t have been to uncover some government skunk or a big illegal deal, because you didn’t know about either. Neither of us did. No, it was the death of Raina Manhardt’s son. That’s the trigger. But you haven’t mentioned it.”

He frowned, trying to figure out how she knew.

“You took the front section of the
Herald Tribune
with you,” she told him. “Just the front section. There was only one article in it that connected to you.”

Jesus. She did not miss much. “Okay, you’re partly correct. I knew her in Berlin, and I was fond of her son. I suspect there’s more to his skiing accident.”

“You
suspect?
Come on, Jay. If I play, the first rule is you’ve got to level with me. No holding back. I want everything you know or deduce or guess. I need a lot of very compelling reasons to throw in my lot with a traitor. Tell me about Raina Manhardt.”

“You say you expect me to play fair,” he shot back. “Then it’s your turn. A trade. Tell me about your husband and why you’ve been such a troublemaker since he died.”

She stiffened.

“As I recall, he was in the Special Activities Division,” he prompted.
The CIA’s elite undercover paramilitary could deploy faster than Army Special Forces. Just two weeks after 9/11, they slipped into Afghanistan. With greenbacks in saddlebags and large steel suitcases, they rode horses and rusty trucks into the backcountry to track down tribal warlords and trade bundles of cash for information about enemy troop positions, armaments, communications, and command structures. They had been remarkably successful.

She moistened her lips. “Yes. A paramilitary officer.” In an instant, it was late November 2001. Snow veiled the steep slopes of the Tora Bora. Wiry and intense, Rafe was huddled with Afghan soldiers near a broken Soviet T-55 tank. In his thick beard, he looked just like them, his wool
pakol
hat pulled down to one ear in their dashing way. But when he spotted her, his wind-burned face opened in a smile that turned the gray, bitter day into summer and told her everything she needed to know—he was still her Rafe. She had just arrived to work on the critical hunt for Osama bin Laden.

She took a deep breath. “The day I got to the Tora Bora, we caught a
mujahid
who claimed to cook for bin Laden. He described the cave where bin Laden was holed up. It was consistent with our intel and only a half hour away, but the
muj
said bin Laden planned to move out by dusk. We had only a couple of hours. So I told Rafe and the Afghans to go ahead. I’d get Special Forces backup. At that point, there was no commander on the scene above the rank of lieutenant colonel.”

He nodded. “I remember.”

“So they took off on horseback. The Special Forces captain wanted to send support, but he didn’t have a specific mission order. So he had to ask the light colonel, and the light colonel crawled up Central Command. No one made a decision. While I was yelling at them to help Rafe anyway, two Russian choppers flew in from the direction of Pakistan and landed near the cave. Within minutes they were back in the air, returning the way they’d come—loaded with people. I radioed Rafe to say it was too late—get the hell out of there—but a hundred al-Qaeda had jumped them. I could hear the automatic fire across the slopes at the same time it was coming over the radio. It was . . . horrible. Then Rafe got shot. He was in a lot
of pain, but he held on long enough to tell me a
muj
was saying we’d tortured the cook until he talked, but bin Laden had escaped because Allah had given him wings.” It felt as if a shard of glass were caught in her throat. “Rafe was signing off when he was shot again. That bullet killed him. All of our Alliance Afghans were killed, too.”

“And you’re the one who told them to go ahead. You’d take care of everything.”

She said nothing, continuing to drive, chin up, tears streaming down her cheeks.

He remembered a box of tissues. He fumbled around and dug it out from beside his seat. She grabbed a wad and dried her cheeks and swiped at her eyes.

He said, “You think one of the Eastern Alliance people warned alQaeda?”

She blew her nose. “The Afghans switched sides a lot, so yes, probably. If Command had backed us, we could’ve got bin Laden. And nobody tortured that cook. We fed him. We’d been able to cut off their food supplies, and he was hungry.”

Tice was silent. Her eyes were puffy and red. She seemed drained and terribly sad. She peered across at him as if to see whether he really had stuck it out with her. Their gazes met. Unexpectedly, vulnerability passed between them. It was only a moment, but the exposure was jarring.

They looked away quickly.

He sat motionless, unnerved.
What have you done?
The voice was inside his mind before he could stop it. It was always the same accusation. Marie. Mariette. Aaron. Kristoph. He could not bring himself to look at her.

The silence lengthened until finally he said, “It was arrogant of you to send them after bin Laden, but it was also their choice to go without official support. You showed confidence and an ability to see a job that needed to be done. You did the right thing. And now you’re facing another tough decision—you know we’ve got to trust each other.”

The car felt too small to her, claustrophobic.
He’s pretending “warmth and compassion.” He doesn’t mean it
. She braked as they approached a stoplight. Ahead, farmland rolled off on one side of the black road where leafy trees
made shadowy mounds in the fields. She read the intersection’s signs and hid a cold smile. They were only ten miles from the Langley team.

“That’s them!” Rink whacked the steering wheel in triumph. He turned on the BMW’s engine. “Look! You can see the Jag plain as day. We’ve got them now!”

Jerry Angelides sat tensely while excitement prickled his skin. His two Colts—his and Billy’s—waited in his lap. He had a funny feeling, like a spring sunburn. Like the traffic light turned red just so the Jag would have to stop and they could positively ID it. Things were looking up. His four cars were ready.

When the light turned green, and the Jag sped off, he snapped, “Don’t lose her, but stay back!”

Rink pressed the gas pedal. As they followed, Angelides dialed his cell. He would put all of the cars on a conference call and coordinate the attack.

Miami, Florida

As Martin Ghranditti’s private Falcon 2000 jet landed with a light bounce, he stared out into Miami’s glitzy night. He could almost smell the frangipani and mango groves in the sultry air. It reminded him of the scent of his woman, the only one he had really loved, dead now nearly twenty years. He had been accused of having no heart, but he carried her there, wrapped in memories, her platinum hair a halo. As the jet’s engines decelerated to a throb, and the craft cruised across the tarmac, he could feel the electricity of her touch. He unsnapped his seat belt and swayed toward the bar.

Armand appeared from nowhere. “Your usual Grey Goose, sir?” He was sixty years old, of moderate height and weight, with a sour face and mouse-gray hair so smooth it could be painted to his pasty skin. He spoke deferentially, the tone of a loyal servant awaiting orders.

Occasionally Ghranditti wondered what Armand was really thinking, what any of them were thinking, but tonight he cared less than usual. “Yes. On the rocks.” He marched to a plush sofa at the front of the jet and sat. He did not bother with a seat belt. They were rolling toward the hangar.

The vodka arrived, and Armand’s hand extracted a side table and set down the glass and vanished. Ghranditti adjusted the glass and drank. He liked the light, clean nose. Even more, he liked the explosiveness of the taste. The vodka shot a mellow glow clear to his gut. He took a deep breath. For some reason, he was in a nostalgic mood. He did not quite approve, but as he had grown older he had allowed himself small indulgences.

He drank again, mourning the Cold War. His era. A great time to be alive. Longing for those days, he stared into his glass and felt a surge of grief. Afterward, the grand old Soviet Union had turned into a sorry New Russia—the munitions dump of the world, where everything was for sale. And worst of all, Russia and the United States quit financing their proxy wars, which killed the small, exclusive club of top weapons players to
which he had belonged. The business erupted into chaos. Anyone could show up in Eastern Europe with an end-user certificate and make deals. One result was the new generation was both arrogant and ignorant. Despite the ease of making money in their petty little deals, and their ability to sound cutting-edge by talking e-mail and Web sites, they could not tell an Igla dummy missile from a real one.

Still, to them, he was out of step. An antique, a dinosaur. It had disgusted him so much that he finally retired. Like other Cold War arms titans, he was now off everyone’s radar screen. He wondered whether the others resented it as much as he.

By the time he looked out the window, the jet had stopped inside the hangar. He drained his glass. What he wanted most was to go home to his family, but first he must meet his client.

He stepped from the jet onto the stairs. A stench of diesel and sweat stained the muggy air. As he straightened to his full height, a sense of purpose flowed through him, and he looked down to where a tall, trim man with stylishly unkempt hair stood gripping a Toys “R” Us shopping bag in his right hand. He had no beard and wore a Western two-button dark suit and fashionable wire-rimmed glasses on his large nose. The glasses were a focal point, purposefully distracting from the flat cheeks and sharply angular face that could radiate a feral power that even Ghranditti found disconcerting, which was one reason he carried a 9mm Beretta in a shoulder holster. The client’s name was Faisal al-Hadi.

“Assalaam alaykom, Sayed Faisal.”
Ignoring the handrail, not hurrying, Ghranditti walked down the steps.

“Alaykom assalaam, Sayed Martin,”
al-Hadi replied politely.
“Izzayak?”
“I’m well, thank you,” Ghranditti continued in Arabic. His two security men stood a few feet distant, holding the client’s M-4 and handgun. Behind them waited Ghranditti’s armored limo, the rear doors open. “I hope you’ll ride with me,” he continued. “It will be my pleasure to drop you at your hotel.” This had already been decided, but making it a social pleasantry gave lip service to the lie of friendship. In business as in statecraft, there were no “friends,” only interests.