The Last Spymaster (9 page)

She frowned. “How’d he manage to land in a private cell with amenities?”

Lieutenant Oxley shrugged. “I heard Tice was so cooperative in his debriefings that he got concessions. He knows how to take care of himself.”

Tice’s books—histories and biographies—were arranged by author surnames, no alphabetical errors. In the desk drawer were pencils, stationery, a dictionary, and a few other items. An AM-FM radio sat on top. Everything was neat, painfully tidy.

As the lieutenant waited patiently, she searched the drawer and found two color photos. One was a candid of a younger Tice and an older man—Palmer Westwood—taken in front of the Trevi Fountain in Rome probably in the mid-1980s, judging by their clothes. Both wore open-necked shirts. Hanging from Tice’s neck was a gold chain and some kind of gold triangle. She studied their postures. They stood about eighteen inches apart, their gazes leveled on the camera’s lens while their shoulders leaned slightly toward each other, their weight shifted to give a sense of closeness. Body language tended to be more honest and difficult to alter for deception than were words.

“Who’s that with Tice?” Oxley asked, looking over her shoulder.

“A friend.” She showed him the second picture. “This is his family.”

It was a formal portrait, the same one she had seen in his file. It appeared to be from the mid-1980s, too. Tice’s wife was a stunning platinum blonde. Her eyes were an unusual gemlike green. But there was something else about them, too, something haunted—and haunting. Tice and his wife sat on chairs. Their little boy stood between and behind, looking proud, while the girl, older than the boy, rested her forearms on her mother’s lap and gazed up adoringly at Tice. But Tice and his wife leaned apart, signaling some kind of rift. Elaine recalled Hannah’s comment—she had not envied the wife. The woman had a vacant gaze, as if she had spent too many years on a runway or checking her makeup, had been told too many times how dazzlingly, boringly gorgeous she was.

“I didn’t know he had a family,” Oxley said.

“Odd that they never visited.” She wondered where the wife and children were. She still had that part of his biography to read. She continued through the drawer. In a back corner, she found a gold chain. She compared it with the one in the photo in which Tice wore an open-necked shirt.

“Doesn’t look like the one in the picture,” Oxley observed.

“You may be right.” She searched for the gold bangle. Nothing.

She dropped the chain into her pocket, put the photos into her purse, and went to the sink. As she checked the toiletries, sadness swept through her. There was something about a man’s soap and shaving lotion that always got her. Probably memories of Rafe, she decided, and turned away.

Two newspapers from the day before—
USA Today
and the
International Herald Tribune
—were stacked on the floor beside the desk. The front section of the
Herald Tribune
was missing. Oxley helped her pull the squashed newspapers from inside the dummy, but none was from the missing section.

She walked to the door, turned, and pondered the claustrophobic room. Despite the comfy-looking chair and TV, it was unnervingly sterile. She imagined herself to be Tice and felt a sudden oppressive futility. Tice had never really been here, she concluded. It contained little of him, despite his being locked up in Allenwood for three years and knowing he was sentenced to life.

“Ready?” Oxley asked.

She nodded, and they retraced their path through the gray prisonscape of cells, bars, electronic gates, and institutional hush. Outdoors, the long shadows of afternoon had spread across the antiseptic buildings and meticulous grounds. In the distance, the foothills of the northern Allegheny Mountains rose in deceptively soft shapes, blood-red in the waning light.

“So what do you think?” Oxley asked as they walked back to her rental car.

“Tice is a man who leaves little to chance,” she told him thoughtfully. “But I’m beginning to get a strong sense of him. One way or another, I’ll find him.”

Omaha, Nebraska

Over the past year the loading foreman had lost so much at the slots in Council Bluffs that his wife wanted a divorce. So when an anonymous offer came, sweetened with an advance of five thousand dollars in cash, he said a fast yes before his anonymous benefactor changed his mind.

The shipment in question contained cutting-edge satellite phones developed for Uncle Sam. Impact-resistant and waterproof, they united accessories never found in one place. Among them were wireless e-mail and Internet access and highly sophisticated GPS readers—and all used scrambled signals that cloaked tracking.

Plus, the sat phones could shoot megapixel photos or video with more than a million points of resolution—four times the quality of most cam phones. Officers could see what their soldiers saw and advise them instantly. On top of that, they were multiband, offering seamless mobility anywhere in the world. Military and government users could fly from Europe to the United States and Japan and China and Russia with a dozen stops in between and still never have to change phones or risk losing the data stored inside.

When the big truck finished loading, the foreman left the bay open and gave his people a break. They hurried indoors to the coffeepot, while he strolled around to the driver and handed him a cigar. They stood there talking for fifteen minutes.

When he returned, crates had been moved around, but nothing seemed missing. Best of all, his bowling bag was sitting on the lip; he brought it to work the days he planned to roll a few. He peered around the deserted loading area, then ahead at the security kiosk, where a guard—one of his gambling buddies—was waving a van out.

He snapped open the bag. A smile spread across his face as he stared at the neat stacks of hundred-dollar bills. His heart light, he closed and locked the bay doors, then stepped out to where he was visible in the driver’s side-view mirror. As soon as he waved, the truck rolled off. He stood there watching, grinning, holding the bag tightly. No bowling tonight, he decided.
He would make one last trip to the slots at friendly Harrah’s for old time’s sake. Then he would quit. After tonight, he would quit for sure.

Seattle, Washington

From where he sat at his computer, the traffic manager at the assembly factory sent shipments around the globe every day. With a few drumbeats of his fingertips, he doled out tens of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment to governments and businesses. So when the offer came for more cash than he earned in a year, he thought about it that way: Instead of the usual keys on his keyboard, he would just tap others. And the diverted merchandise would go to Kansas City. That was important, too. Kansas City was far from the dangerous regimes of Iran or North Korea or Syria or any of the other countries on the Department of Commerce’s list of embargoed nations.

With a flicker of his eyes, and an appeased conscience, he spotted the first consignments of Tuff Boss—a brand-new, cutting-edge notebook computer so rugged its magnesium-alloy case stopped bullets. Only four pounds in weight, the Tuff Boss also boasted a spill-resistant keyboard as well as a disk drive mounted in a stainless-steel case and packed in a special protective gel. You could run a truck over it, and it would still work. Waterproof, vaporproof, and shockproof, a Tuff Boss cranked so much memory it easily operated huge programs, which was why these first ones were going to emergency-response teams, soldiers in the field, and FBI bomb squads.

He hit the keys and redirected three of the shipments to Kansas City. The NYPD antiterrorist unit would just have to wait.

Santa Barbara, California

The day was foggy and cold. Seagulls sailed over the tall palms that dotted the grounds of the research institute in the heart of the Silicon Coast. Dressed in a standard UPS uniform, a man paused in the delivery entry of the stylish modern building. As expected, three wood boxes were waiting.
There was no one around, although the hot music of Parliament’s “Flashlight” drifted from a glassed-in office at the far end of the warehouse-size room, so loud he could hear it despite the door’s being firmly closed.

He carried a box out to the UPS van he had just commandeered. The driver was in the rear, drugged. When he awoke, he would have a blistering headache and no idea his uniform and vehicle had been used for a quick but very lucrative robbery.

The thief slid the box into the van and hurried back for the next, because UPS drivers always hurried. A professional, he had taken the wrong product many years ago, which had put him in the dangerous situation of returning it and snatching the correct one. Now he always knew what he was supposed to grab. These boxes should contain thousands of StarDusts, subminiature computers in development for more than a decade. So miniaturized it was not much larger than a grain of sand, each StarDust was fueled by tiny solar batteries and capable of only two or three elementary jobs. But together, they could establish wireless connections among themselves and create powerful networks that could blanket anything that moved, grew, made noise, or gave off heat or odor.

He shoved the box next to the first and headed back for the third. Star-Dusts could be scattered like flower seeds across farms and cities or tossed onto trucks or planes or trains that shipped matériel and people. Wherever they were, their networks would send detailed data about ordinary people or squads of soldiers or scientists in clandestine weapons labs back to control centers where high-octane computers would collate the information and turn it over to whoever needed it. Designed for the government, they would not be available to the public for years.

Back in the van with the third and final box, he stopped long enough to open each. All contained little Bubble Wrapped bundles. Inside the bundles were dozens of the simple computers, each in its own plastic packet. Shaking his head in awe over the impossibly small size, he repacked everything and drove off toward the security kiosk. The guard looked at his uniform, not at his face, and waved him through.

Along the North River, North Carolina

Palmer Westwood’s security center was in the cellar of his pre–Civil War manse. Dripping mud, Tice and he entered from outside, down indoor stairs. Tice checked the array of monitors that surveilled the compound’s perimeter. Everything looked quiet. He focused on the room. A second flight of steps led up into the house. A TV hung from a wall. On a second were cabinets, wet bar, refrigerator, and a glass case of arms. There were chairs, a daybed, and a coffee table. The air was odorless, the ventilation system running quietly. If the place was stocked with food and water, as it no doubt was, Westwood was equipped for a small siege. The careful arrangements were typical.

Westwood sat at the desk, which held a wireless computer and telephone and shortwave radio. He stripped off his hip boots. Standing, Tice skinned off his wet clothes. Westwood showed him the bathroom and a walk-in closet of clothing and disguises. Glancing frequently at the security monitors, they dried off and dressed quickly. Tice put on jeans, a denim shirt, tennis shoes, and a light jacket.

Westwood changed into a blue-checkered shirt and jeans and canvas shoes. Then he grabbed his M-16 and returned to the staircase that led outdoors.

He raised the rifle, and his face darkened. “Get out of here, Jay. You’ve got clean clothes. This is your last chance. I’ll give you a head start before I report you, but only because we used to be friends.”

Tice studied the old Cold Warrior then reached into his pocket.

“Careful,” Westwood warned.

Tice nodded and withdrew his hand. He opened his fingers.

Westwood’s posture sagged. “You’ve kept it all these years?”

Tice looked at it, too—a triangle of gold, jagged on two sides, lying on
his palm. He let it slide onto the desktop. The gold caught the overhead light and glittered. “It wasn’t so long ago, not for us. Let’s see your watch. And don’t pretend you don’t have the fob. You couldn’t turn your back on what happened any more than I could.”

Westwood sighed and gave an almost imperceptible nod. As he walked toward Tice, he took out his watch and chain. He removed the fob and laid it next to Tice’s gold piece. With a touch of his fingers, Tice slid the two triangles together. Each had a toothy side that fit the other’s perfectly.

Westwood fell heavily into his desk chair. The crevices on his face deepened into canyons. Abruptly he looked all of his seven decades.

He and Tice peered into each other’s eyes then quickly away.

“What do you want?” Westwood asked.

“Have you heard anything from Raina Manhardt?”

“Raina? Not in years.”

From his shirt pocket, Tice took the clipping he had torn from yesterday’s
International Herald Tribune
and silently passed it over. Westwood laid it on the desk and bent over it, his shoulders hunched. Tice stared at it, too:

As Westwood read, Tice studied the two photos that accompanied the piece. One showed Kristoph, his hair sun-streaked, his grin breezy. That was the way Tice remembered him, full of energy and intelligence. He was Raina’s only child. The second was a close-up of their two-story house in Potsdam. A black funeral wreath hung on the door. The article quoted a press release issued by the BND conveying Frau Manhardt’s gratitude to the public for their outpouring of sympathy and announcing she was taking an official leave of absence. The agency asked the public to respect her privacy and allow her time to grieve. It concluded with a firm statement that the young man’s death was a tragic accident with no relation to his mother’s work.