15th Affair (21 page)

I wheeled Julie into the elevator, keeping Martha on a tight leash, and somehow, Martha’s business was quickly done. She was desperate to go for a run. She pulled and barked at me when I turned to go back into the building.

“You don’t always get what you want,” I said to Jules and Martha. “And that goes for me, too.”

I then proceeded to do what single mothers all over the world do—that is, everything at once.

I fed the baby and I fed Martha, and after drinking the dregs of the opened bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge, I dished up some pasta salad and wolfed it down.

On the way to the dishwasher, I grabbed a basket that I keep on the counter near the microwave. It’s eight inches square, four inches high, a catch-all for receipts and the odd paper clip, marking pen, and business card.

Two men from the CIA had paid me a call last week, the point of which was to tell me to stop looking for Alison Muller. They had left their business cards on the counter. I couldn’t remember seeing those cards again.

I hoped Mrs. Rose had put them in the receipt basket.

I upended the basket and pawed through the contents, and
yes
, I found the cards. Michael J. Dixon. Christopher Knightly. Case officers, Central Intelligence Agency. Phone numbers were in the lower left corner.

I remembered that Dixon, the dark-haired one, had seemed to be the one in charge.

It was nearly 8 p.m. Would he answer his phone?

I had to try.

I dialed the number and he answered on the third ring.

“Agent Dixon, this is Lindsay Boxer. You visited me a couple of days ago to talk about Alison Muller.”

“I remember, Mrs. Molinari. How can I help you?”

“I need to see you. I have information that concerns national security. It also concerns my husband, and I think you’ll want to hear all about it.”

Dixon gave me an address and told me to come in the next morning at nine. I didn’t know what I was going to say when I met with him, but I had all night to figure it out.

The whole minute-by-minute sleepless night.

I GOT OUT
of bed before my baby girl woke up. I showered to get my blood running, and while Mrs. Rose buttoned down the corners of my household, I called in sick, asked Brenda to tell Conklin that I would talk to him after lunch, and then ordered a taxi to drive me to the CIA office on Montgomery Street.

I dressed to impress, meaning I put on my best blue gabardine pantsuit, just cleaned, a good-looking tailored shirt, and my smart Freda Salvador shoes, which I’d last worn to meet in DC with FBI honcho June Freundorfer.

Mrs. Rose topped up my coffee mug while I Googled the address Dixon had given me and found that it was the location of a CIA division called the National Resources Program, or NR.

I read and clicked and read some more.

And what I learned was that the NR was to the CIA at Langley, Virginia, what schoolyard pickup hoops were to the NBA.

The NR recruited largely untrained people with access to information: foreign nationals living in the United States who were willing to gather intel for cash and probably a feeling of self-importance. The NR also hired on Americans with overseas access to government workers, aircraft manufacturing plants, newspapers, and the like.

These part-time operatives came with a variety of backgrounds. Some were college students, some were corporate executives, entertainers, and young techies—like Jad. And like Bud and Chrissy, who had been secretly filming Michael Chan and Alison Muller.

And while these geeks had been spying on spies, Joe Molinari had been right in the thick of it.

My taxi driver buzzed the intercom.

I told Mrs. Rose I would call her in a few hours and hugged everyone at the door.

My driver asked, “Alexander Building, right?”

I said, “Right,” as the cab lunged from the curb and out into traffic.

Twenty-five minutes later, I was on the street in front of an early-1900s neo-Gothic, tan brick office building. I entered the lobby, stopped at the desk, and showed my credentials to the security guard.

He called upstairs to Agent Dixon’s office, then wrote my name on a peel-and-stick tag, handed it to me, and said, “Fourth floor. You can go on up.”

I followed his pointing finger to the elevator bank.

I WAS ALONE
in the elevator that whisked me smoothly to the fourth floor. The doors slid open and I stepped out onto a granite floor leading to a pair of glass doors etched with the eagle-centric, round blue logo of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The reception area was thickly carpeted in blue, and a cluster of upholstered chairs gathered around a circular glass coffee table. A gallery of gold-framed portraits lined the long wall behind the reception desk: all former heads of the CIA, including President G. H.W. Bush and our current CIA chief.

I gave my name to the woman behind the desk, signed a log, and took a seat. There were no magazines on the table, but I didn’t have to wait long.

Agent Michael Dixon entered the room through a door to the left of the receptionist, greeted me as Mrs. Molinari, and asked me to follow him. We walked past many open cubicles with young staffers inside and other offices with closed doors.

At the end of the hallway, Dixon opened the door to a wood-paneled conference room and showed me in. Christopher Knightly, the second of the two agents I’d met in my apartment, was standing at the windows, looking out over the city with his back to the door.

He turned and said, “Morning, Sergeant Boxer. Please have a seat.” And to the man I had assumed was his senior partner, “Thanks, Dixon. I’ll take it from here.”

I sat in one of the eight swivel chairs around the smallish mahogany conference table. I refused an offer of coffee or bottled water, although my mouth was dry. I was wondering if I’d made a monumental mistake in coming here.

Knightly pulled out a chair across from me and lowered his football player heft down into it.

He said, “You told Dixon you have information that may be of importance. That you know something about Worldwide Flight 888. What do you want to tell us?”

The inference was plain and almost laughable. This was the CIA, an arm of a huge intelligence-gathering agency with fingers in pies I couldn’t even imagine.

I was a cop. Just a cop. But if I’d had Christopher Knightly in the box, I could have fired questions at him for hours. So I assumed that attitude.

I said, “I’m working a quadruple homicide, and I’m fairly certain that this isn’t news to you. I want to know why Michael Chan was murdered and by whom. I want to know who killed the housekeeper and the two CIA computer techs in the room next to Chan’s at around the same time. I want to know why I was followed and beaten by four Asian men who had a Stinger missile launcher in an apartment they were renting in Chinatown. And I want to know what my husband, Joe Molinari, had to do with all or any of that.

“If you can’t give me answers and compelling reasons why I should keep what I know to myself, I’m going to let the press know that the CIA knew about WW 888 before it went down and may even have had something to do with that disaster.”

I was suddenly afraid that I’d said too much; that like a little terrier on the street going after a pit bull, I’d taken a bigger bite than I could chew.

If I was seen as a danger to national security, I might be taken into government custody. Or worse. I thought of the sweaty young man with the clandestine videos on his laptop, afraid for his life. I thought of Bud and Chrissy dead on a hotel room floor.

Knight gave me a patronizing smile and said, “We’re not going to hurt you, Sergeant. I’m not the bad guy.”

I exploded.

“So who
is
the bad guy? That’s what I want to know. Who’s the bad guy in all this?”

The door opened behind me. I swiveled my chair and saw a man who looked a lot like my husband come into the room.

My God
. It was really
him
.

“I guess I’m the bad guy,” Joe said, dragging a chair out from the table and dropping down into it.

My mouth had fallen open, but the rest of me was
paralyzed
. Joe looked terrible. He had a beard, there were bags under his eyes, and his clothes were filthy.

What the hell had happened to him?

Why didn’t he look glad to see me?

I managed to croak, “Joe?”

He looked at me with an expression I can only call sadness.

“What do you want to know, Lindsay? I’ll try to tell you what you want to know.”

I’D BEEN SHOCKED
into silence.

This was my husband. My
husband
.

I looked across the table at Knightly and back at Joe. Joe said, “Chris, give us a moment. And kill the cameras.”

“Got it,” Knightly said. When he’d left and the door was closed, Joe moved over to the chair next to mine and reached for my hands.

I pulled away.

It was pure instinct. This man resembled the man I had loved and married, but I no longer knew who he was.

He said, “Lindsay, I know you’re upset. I would be, too.”

“
Upset?
”

“Wrong word. I know you’re furious at me and I…and that I deserve it. I know I’ve hurt you, and I can’t tell you how sad that makes me. I know what I’m saying isn’t working, but please, if you can, trust me.”

Trust him? How? Why?

“Where have you been?”

“I can’t say. Not yet.”

I shouted, “I’ve been thinking you’re
dead!
”

“I know.”

“And sometimes I
wished
you
were
.”

That was a lie, but I said it with vehemence. And Joe didn’t take his eyes away from me.

I kept going. “You didn’t call me or leave a message or send me a lousy text to say you were OK.”

He sighed and looked down at his hands. Was he remorseful? Was he thinking what to say to me? I didn’t care.

“You walked out on me and on Julie. In the last ten days, I’ve been viciously attacked. I’ve been beaten, shot at, outnumbered, and outgunned. And what have you been doing? Playing I Spy games with Alison Muller?”

He was looking me with sad eyes and I was doing second-by-second gut checks. Was he lying? Was he in trouble? What or who was Joe Molinari?

“Oh, God, Lindsay. I didn’t know you were attacked. Were you hurt? Are you OK?”

“Talk to me, Joe. Tell me everything and I’ll let you know if I’m OK after I’ve heard you out.”

He tried to take my hands again, and again I pulled away. This was pure reflex. I didn’t know if I still loved Joe, or if he had ever actually loved
me
.

“BE RIGHT BACK,”
Joe said.

He got up and left the room. I watched his empty chair spin lazily in his absence. I wondered what he could possibly say to me that would make me trust him—or if he would even try.

A few long minutes later, Joe came back into the room with two bottles of water, put one down in front of me, and uncapped the other. He drank half of it down.

Then he said, “Ali Muller used to work for me, I don’t know, eighteen years ago. We were both pretty young, idealistic, and she had a gift for intelligence gathering.”

“What kind of gift?” I asked.

“More than one, actually. Her IQ was off the charts. She was beautiful. People trusted her. She spoke a couple of languages. And she was pretty fearless.”

I had heard enough about Ali Muller from June Freundorfer, her CIA friend John Carroll, and her husband, Khalid Khan, and now Joe was singing her praises.

I didn’t want to know more. But I wasn’t letting myself off easily. Alison Muller was central to this sickening amalgam of secrets. And I was pretty sure she’d killed Shirley Chan.

Joe was saying, “She volunteered to set honey traps. You know?”

“She seduced men, slept with them, beguiled them into giving her information.”

“Right. That’s right.”

“And she slept with you, isn’t that also right, Joe?”

“We were in our twenties. It was kid stuff and it’s long over, Lindsay. What is relevant is that she was successful, well regarded in the Company, but eventually, she hated that kind of work. By then I was with the FBI and had lost touch with her.”

“Joe, come on. You’ve seen her recently.”

“I’m getting to that. When I was with Homeland Security, we knew Michael Chan was a spy for the Chinese, but we thought it was better to leave him in place. And I learned that Ali Muller, who was still with the CIA, had asked to get involved.

“Not long after, I moved here to be with you. Ali lived down the coast, had a good high-level day job that enabled her to travel without scrutiny. She was married with kids. It was a perfect setup for her real job. And as I came to find out recently, Chan fell for Muller. Very hard.

“I was in the Four Seasons the day Chan was taken out.”

“I know that.”

Joe arched his eyebrows.

“I have you on tape. I also have you on tape out at Chan’s house the next day.”

Joe nodded, and sighed deeply. “That surveillance van.”

I searched his face, looking for tells or twitches. But Joe was a trained liar, government grade. Triple threat.

“It was getting very complicated then,” Joe said. “We’d lost track of Muller. Chan and those two tech kids had been gunned down right under our noses. And we were aware that a big operation was in the wings.”

“Like the take-down of a passenger jet?”

“Yes, yes. We were aware of a possible threat. We didn’t know details. We thought Chan might know. That’s why Muller was with him. We didn’t know who his contacts were or if our information was any good at all. We didn’t have dates or times.”