Once a Spy (23 page)

For the first time, Charlie saw Drummond’s inner workings as an assembly of human rather than mechanized parts. He felt himself beginning to understand him now, and sympathizing. To an extent. “Then I’d think that you, of all people, wouldn’t have left your son alone all the time.”

Drummond wiped his mouth with a sleeve, as if clearing the way for a forceful rebuttal, when the cell phone chimed.

30

Six minutes
earlier, E. Burton Hattemer had been sitting in a conference room in the Senate Hart Office Building while a staffer enthusiastically detailed a solar-powered, robotic surveillance device that looked, flew, and perched just like the barn swallows prevalent in the Middle East. “The prototype can be done for as little as thirty million,” she told the roomful of Senate Intelligence Committee members and advisors.

Hattemer wanted to say: Christ, that kind of cash could get us ten decent human spies and a hundred times the actionable intel.

Six years on the Hill had taught him that it would be more effective to partition the sentiment into gentle memos in the coming months when the Appropriations Subcommittee appointed a Robot-Barn-Swallow Task Force, the task force delegated a special panel, and the special panel prepared, drafted, and redrafted its recommendation to the committee.

Feeling his cell phone vibrate, he fished it from his suit pants. The LED flashed a reminder to pick up tulips for his wife at the florist in Potomac.

Hurrying out of the conference room, he said, “I beg everybody’s pardon. I’ve got to attend to a geriatric digestive issue.” Who here would want to know about that?

The florist—or SOS—message appeared when the switchboard in Stockholm activated a virtually undetectable shortwave band. “Tulips” was Drummond Clark. Three years had passed since Hattemer had communicated with his old friend other than by greeting card. That he would get in touch in this fashion, now, suggested Drummond’s life was in peril and that it was an inside job.

Executive Order 11905, signed by President Ford and bolstered by Reagan with EO 12333, banned assassinations by government organizations. Yet spies continued to die of the flu, falls from terraces, or boating accidents with far greater frequency than people in other professions, in large part because men and women at the very highest levels of government believed themselves to be above the law or turned blind eyes or deaf ears in the name of the Greater Good—a sorry euphemism, Hattemer thought, for sacrificing ideals in order to mop up inconvenient messes. And that was when there was oversight at all.

For the sake of discretion, he took the stairs down to room SH-219. The two flights hurt like hell, or about as much as he’d anticipated. He’d been forced to abandon fieldwork when his deteriorated hips were replaced with six pounds of metal alloys, making the constant air and Jeep travel impractical. Still, it took him another two years to hang up his trench coat.

Protected by armed guards around the clock, few places on Earth afforded more secure communication than SH-219. Essentially a windowless steel vault, it blocked electromagnetic eavesdropping and prohibited signals from escaping. Every morning it was swept for listening devices with an attention to minutiae unseen outside archaeological digs. Even the electrical current was filtered.

Hattemer sat at the armchair at the inner prong of the giant, horseshoe-shaped table. On the olive-green wall behind him were the seals of the various intelligence agencies. Before him was a wall of high-definition monitors, the face of a system the Senate Intelligence Committee members liked to refer to as “state-of-the-art.” In fact, state-of-the-art systems lacked many of its classified bells and whistles. A few keypunches could bring him into locked video conference with American intelligence officers operating anywhere from the United States to the United Arab Emirates. He could access all the classified computer networks. He could view satellite imagery of just about any place on the planet, either from vast archives or in real time. And if the pictures were inadequate, a program easier to use than text messaging, in his estimation, enabled him to dispatch reconnaissance drones.

He elected to use a device whose listing in the Intelligence Committee
budget—“sound reproduction instrument”—always rankled him. It was, in laymen’s terms, a telephone.

Drummond opened the cell phone and raised it to his lips, but said nothing.

A brash young woman’s voice burst through the earpiece. “Jimmy, that you?”

“No,” Drummond said, “Willie.”

“This ain’t two-five-two, oh-two-seven, oh-four-four-six?”

“Sorry, ma’am, no. Good day.”

Drummond didn’t merely hang up; he disconnected the call by tearing the battery from the back of the phone.

Charlie was mystified. “What? Was the phone about to self-destruct?”

“We can’t use it again,” Drummond said. “Even when it’s off, it emits a signal.”

“Then how will we get the call from your man in Washington?”

“That
was
him, with more than a little voice alteration interposed between his handset and my earpiece.”

“I may have missed something.”

“‘Willies’ is a proprietary shorthand for hostiles. When I said, ‘No Willie,’ it was a recognition code that signified I wasn’t under duress. His ‘ain’t’ in turn let me know that no one was holding a gun to his head. ‘Good day’ was my sign-off that his message had been received.”

“I’m guessing you’ve left out the part about what the message was.”

“It was the number he said he’d meant to dial.” On the cover of the killers’ road atlas, Drummond wrote
“2520270446.”

“So will we need to get another phone to call it?” Charlie asked.

“No, we won’t need to make any more calls. We just subtract my ‘distress code’ number from it.”

“A billion, five hundred thirteen million, four hundred seventy-nine thousand, three hundred and eleven?”

Drummond did the math on paper. “Not bad,” he said.

“You spend seven days a week handicapping …”

With a look of either mock dismay or actual dismay—Charlie wasn’t sure which—Drummond again wrote out:

  2520270446
–
1016791135

This time, he tabulated it as:

1514589311

“Actually, we use what’s known as false subtraction,” he said. “In this case it means you have a series of ten separate subtractions. For instance, when you subtract six from zero four numbers in, you don’t borrow from the column to the left, you just invent the ten. Or when you subtract nine from seven—you pretend the seven is a seventeen. False subtraction adds an extra layer of security and makes the math simpler, once you get used to it. The total here is a sort of alphabetical equivalent of ‘one hick.’ The number fifteen equals the letter O, fourteen equals N, etcetera. Now, ‘one hick’ doesn’t sound very encouraging, but it’s probably the closest safe house Burt had at his disposal.” He flipped through the atlas. “Ah, there’s a Hickory Road about twenty miles north.”

The light at the end of Charlie’s tunnel burst back on at high wattage. With energy to match, he threw the Durango into a U-turn.

“So what’s the deal with this ‘Hen’ guy?” he asked.

“From the Cavalry?”

“Yeah.”

“First, I need to tell you one more thing.”

“What?”

“What I said about Grandpa Tony?”

“Yeah?”

“You won’t tell him that you know, okay?”

A shiver ran the length of Charlie. “There’s no chance whatsoever of that happening,” he said haltingly. Grandpa Tony had passed away eight years ago, and not only was there a funeral, Charlie and Drummond both were pallbearers.

“Thank you,” said Drummond.

“So who’s Hen?” Charlie asked.

To no avail.

31

Cranch continued
firing questions, and Alice volleyed with enough information to create the illusion of cooperation. Eighty percent of the information was useless, but it would be impossible for him to determine which was which.

“What about Drummond Clark?” he asked. “How did you get him?”

“We used a Meals on Wheels van.”

“So that wasn’t a real Meals on Wheels van?”

“It was, once upon a time, in Albany. One of our people got it from a junkyard. It still ran. Just needed a little work on the brakes was all.”

“Were the Meals on Wheels volunteers your people too?”

“Glorified cutouts, really. They believed Clark was an embezzler and that we were a special investigative unit of the IRS.”

“What did you want with him?”

The objective of Alice’s actual operation, code-named “Marquis” (as in
de Sade
, an explicit reference to Fielding), was to investigate Fielding in general and, specifically, to determine whether he’d hired Lincoln Cadaret to assassinate Roberto Mariáteguia, an NSA officer who’d penetrated the Shining Path in Peru. Mariáteguia was found bound to a desk chair in a Lima hotel room, having been bled to death by leeches. The gruesome scene yielded no link to Fielding, but certainly it was his directorial style. A more tangible link was that the contractor who’d built Fielding’s three-hundred-thousand-gallon swimming pool recently had installed a smaller version for Cadaret on nearby St. Bart’s, gratis. Alice had found her way onto a murky trail that led to veteran Company man Drummond Clark. NSA had intercepted numerous communications
from both Mariáteguia and Fielding to Perriman Appliances, where Clark nominally worked. Her hope was that Clark would shed some light on Mariáteguia. Her “holiday” in Brooklyn provided only more questions, though, and the unexpected news of Prabhakar Gaznavi’s visit required she hurry back to Martinique before she could get any answers.

“Drummond Clark works for Perriman Appliances,” she told Cranch, hoping that with only slightly expurgated truth she might elicit the true nature of Fielding’s interest in Clark. “We know Fielding worked there from ninety-one to ninety-four.”

“Thousands of people worked for Perriman Appliances during that time period.”

“We also know about the CIA entry Clark leaves off his résumé. We wanted to learn his connection to Fielding. But as you know if you heard the audio, the closest thing to a secret I uncovered was that Clark’s son goes by Charlie, rather than Charles.”

“One just has to know the right questions.” Cranch balled his hands as if they contained a magic key. “I expect to be getting on a private jet to go debrief Mr. Clark shortly. Maybe you’ll get to listen to some of that audio.”

Until now, Cranch had given Alice no indication that he cared whether she lived or died. Yet here he was trying to impress her. And in so doing, she realized, he’d let slip a bit of information that might prove critical.

32

At Hickory Road
, thick woods dissolved into a secluded pastoral valley. Charlie turned the Durango in at
I HICKORY,
the mile-long lane’s only sign, onto a gravel driveway that wound through hundreds of acres of serene pasture neatly fenced by weather-grayed rails. After several more miles, the driveway ended in a cobblestoned circle and a large stucco-over-stone colonial farmhouse with a commanding view of old-growth orchards and a barn that almost had to have been the basis for the Wyeth painting. Everything was copper as the sun sank into the hazy foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

As he turned off the engine, he heard only a mild breeze, the whinnying of horses, and the soft-shoe of a stream. Nudging Drummond from a nap, he said, “If we need to hole up somewhere while Hattemer straightens things out, this wouldn’t suck.”

“Burt
Hattemer?” Drummond asked, as if there had been discussion of several Hattemers. Clearly the nap had not recharged him.

“Christ. Please don’t tell me he’s really one of them?”

“Them?”

“The people you used to work with who keep trying to kill us?”

“Right, right, of course. No, we’re okay. Burt’s a good friend.”

Despite the assurance, Charlie thought only of how Hattemer might prove their undoing. There was an H in Hattemer, and an E. But at least there was no N. If his name were Hatten, Charlie would have insisted they drive the hell away this instant.

“Come on inside before y’all catch your death,” came a squawky voice.

It belonged to the man who stood atop the marble front steps, holding open the door. Seventy if a day, he wore a parka over long underwear surely purchased in his beefier years; the bottoms hung like pantaloons until sucked into high rubber boots. In and around his assortment of puckers and pits and creases was a cheery face topped by a thicket of white hair.

Ushering Charlie and Drummond into the vaulted foyer, he said, “I’m Mort, the caretaker, and I’m it for the staff here during winter months, so don’t be cross if your suppers are nothing fancy.”

Entering, Charlie was struck by an anxiety he couldn’t explain. He hoped it was just a reflex born of being attacked everywhere he’d set foot the last two days.

He took in the foyer, furnished with an antique drop-leaf table, a tall pewter vase, and a series of framed ornithological watercolors. The lustrous pine floorboards were as wide as diving boards. If this room were representative of the home’s decor, interior design enthusiasts would pay admission to see the rest.

“Whose place is this?” he asked Mort.

“Sir, all I can tell you is he’s an oilman named MacCallum from up in Alaska.”

“You mean that’s all you’re allowed to say?”

“No, sir. Except for he’s a friend of Mr. Hattemer’s, it’s all I know. Mr. MacCallum’s never once set foot here.”

Charlie suspected that he now knew at least as much about MacCallum as Mort did.

“Why don’t y’all come on here into the den and take a load off?” Mort said, leading the way.

The floor of the massive “den” was covered by a pair of rich Oriental carpets—probably no single Oriental carpet on Earth would have been big enough. The walls, with refined checkerboard wainscoting, boasted more art than many galleries; the glass and pewter frames mirrored the flickering within the stone fireplace, making the brass banquet lamps unnecessary. Charlie ogled a Breugel snowscape.