Secrets of State (15 page)

At the end of the ceremony, cemetery workers lowered the casket into the grave. Sam joined a line of mourners who waited to throw a shovel full of dirt on top of the casket. Afterward, he stood alone under the shelter of a beech tree as Andy's family gathered by the gravesite for a private moment.

Someone touched his arm from behind. He turned to see a familiar face. “That was a nice speech.”

“Thanks, Quick. I can barely remember what I said.”

“You diplomats are all so damn glib.”

Edward “Quick” Sands was the head of the CIA's South Asia analysis unit. Sam had not noticed Quick among the mourners. That was one of his talents. Blending in. No one ever seemed to notice Quick. With his long face, gray hair and dark suit, he looked like an undertaker, just part of the backdrop at the Parklawn cemetery.

“Can we talk?” Quick asked.

“Sure.”

Quick led Sam away from the gravesite to a relatively dry spot under the eaves of a massive marble mausoleum.

“How have you been?” Sam asked. “I haven't seen you since I moved over to Argus.”

“I know. The siren song of the private sector. I've heard it too. The Beltway Bandits have been gobbling up so many of my best people that I decided it was time to make the move myself. I've been in talks with Xenos about taking a job with them and being seconded back to the Agency. It'd be a 50 percent bump in salary and I'd be drawing my pension on top.” Quick looked almost apologetic.

“Xenos is an Argus subsidiary.”

“It is. Which explains what I did . . . maybe a little bit. Even if it can't justify it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Andy came to Langley three days ago to see me,” Quick said carefully.

“Oh, shit.”

Quick looked at him appraisingly.

“You know about this?” he asked.

“Panoptes?”

“Yes.”

“I told him not to talk to anyone.”

“I can understand why.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He showed me a copy of the analysis he'd done. It was good work, remarkably good work. I think that was one of the reasons he came to me. Andy knew it was good and it killed him to sit on it.” Quick winced at his own poor choice of words. “Stupid pride.”

“I told him I needed some time,” Sam said miserably.

“Maybe he had doubts. You being with Argus and all.”

“Wait. Did Andy tell you that Argus was the source of the Panoptes material?”

“He did. He told me it wasn't clear to him at first, but he'd figured it out.”

Sam should have thought of that. Krittenbrink was smart as hell and a trained analyst. The connection between Panoptes and Argus was not especially hard to draw once you knew to look for it.

“Andy didn't mention to you that we'd worked on this together?”

“No.”

Sam's stomach turned over, and for a moment, he thought he was going to be sick. Maybe Andy had gone around him to the CIA because he was trying to protect Sam from any possible retribution from his employer. Or maybe he was uncertain about Sam's ultimate loyalties. Whatever his reason, the results were the same. His friend was dead. And he was dead at least in part because Sam had not trusted him with the full truth. It had been a stupid decision on Sam's part, and another data point to add to the guilt set. He swallowed hard and tasted bile in the back of his throat.

“Now, here's the thing.” Quick paused as though searching for the right words.

“Yes?”

“Andy clearly wanted me to do something with the report. Push a button under my desk and summon some secret CIA SWAT team to assault Argus headquarters in Arlington. I'm not sure what he wanted. Probably he wasn't either.”

“So what'd you do?”

“I called Garret Spears and I asked him what was going on. Spears was absolutely accommodating. He denied any knowledge of Panoptes but said he'd look into it. If it was an act, it was one hell of a convincing one.”

“You called Spears?”

Quick looked at the ground between them.

“Yeah. I did. And I wish like hell that I could take that back. So, maybe twenty-four hours after my conversation with Spears, Andy is shot in a crime that is never going to be solved. Doesn't that set off your coincidence alarms?”

“Mine were ringing even before you told me that Andy had talked to you,” Sam admitted.

“I called a friend on the D.C. police force to get some background on the case. Andy was shot twice in the head with a 9mm. What kind of addict does a double-tap to the head? That's more like a professional hit than a fucked-up drug deal. Believe me, Spears knows people who do that kind of thing for a living.”

“I don't doubt it,” Sam said, thinking of John Weeder's cold, dead eyes. “I think he may even employ some of them.”

“I have thirty years in the intel community,” Quick said. “And this is the first time I've ever been afraid, the first time I've known something I wish I didn't know. If Argus is really behind what happened to Andy, what's to stop them from coming after me? Spears seems to trust me for now. But how long will it last?”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I have four months of leave saved up. I'm using a chunk of it starting tomorrow. At this point, my primary career objective is not to die. I'm going somewhere I can lie low for a while and see if I can escape notice.”

“I'm confident you'll succeed in that,” Sam said, without a hint of irony in his voice. “Let me ask you, Quick. What the hell is Panoptes?”

“I have no idea.”

“Who would?”

Quick shrugged.

“Watch yourself, Sam. I think Spears may be a little unbalanced.”

“What makes you say so?”

“After I told him about Andy's report, all he wanted to do was ask me a bunch of questions about fucking trolley cars.”

SKYLINE DRIVE, VIRGINIA

APRIL 11

I
t should have been a seven-hour drive from D.C. to Linville, North Carolina. When Sam reached Front Royal, however, he made a spur-of-the-moment decision to take Skyline Drive rather than follow I-81 South, which was put-a-brick-on-the-accelerator flat and straight. Skyline was a beautiful meandering route along the ridge of the Shenandoahs.

In the summer, Skyline Drive was a virtual parking lot. But this early in the season, he had the road to himself even on a Sunday. Driving helped him think, and as he zipped through the park Sam wrestled with the unanswerable questions that had kept him up at night since seeing Vanalika's name in the NSA intercept. His thoughts kept drifting back to Andy. There was no getting around the fact that the young analyst would still be alive if Sam hadn't asked him to start turning over rocks. It was his fault that Andy was dead. That would be with him forever. Overlaying this sense of responsibility was a burning shame at the relief he had felt when Quick had told him that Spears did not know he and Andy had been working together. It was instinctual, something at the animal level. Self-preservation.

He stopped at the Ivy Creek overlook to stretch his legs and clear his head. The trees were just coming into bloom at the higher elevations, and Sam had an unobstructed view down the length of the Blue Ridge to Stony Man Mountain. To the west, he could see the Alleghenies outlined against a sky that was a perfect cerulean blue. Off to the east, however, Sam could see a dark band of clouds on the horizon like a portent of a gathering storm.

It seemed appropriate. Powerful pieces were being moved around the global chessboard, but Sam could not see whose hands were moving which pieces. Not from the perspective of a pawn.

He had an idea, however, about someone who might, an interesting friend who himself had interesting friends.

Skyline Drive fed into I-64 not too far from the mountain cabin where Sam and Vanalika had so recently spent an idyllic weekend. I-64 took him to I-81 and for some two hundred miles it was all straight and flat.

At Glade Spring, Virginia, he got off the interstate onto a rural highway that took him into North Carolina. The single-lane road crossed in and out of a national forest before reaching Linville. From there, he followed the GPS program in his phone to an unmarked dirt track that Google assured him was called Dry Gulch Road.

Sam pulled into a dirt-and-gravel driveway and parked next to a black mailbox that had a number 9 on it hand-lettered in white paint. The farmhouse at number 9 was ramshackle, with a swayback roofline and peeling red paint. Sam got out and walked up to the front porch. At one end of the porch, two telescopes were propped up on tripods. One was fat and stubby, and the other long and graceful. They were not toys, and they did not look cheap.

At the other end, a heavyset man in jeans and a blue work shirt was dozing in an overstuffed chair with his head tipped back and his mouth open. He snored softly. There was a half-full bottle of bourbon on the coffee table in front of him and a glass tumbler in which melting ice cubes had lightened the liquor by several shades. Sam sat down on one of the other chairs arranged loosely around the table. He took off his sunglasses and set them next to the bottle.

“Why don't you go into the kitchen and get yourself a glass. Bring some more ice while you're at it.” The man's eyes did not open and the snoring only scaled back a decibel or two rather than stopping, but he was clearly awake.

“Afternoon, Earl.”

“Afternoon, Sam.”

Sam went to the kitchen, which looked like it could have been a model from the Sears catalog of 1935. He found glasses in one of the cabinets and a bowl that he filled with ice from a Frigidaire that was old enough to have rust spots.

On the porch, he poured two healthy slugs of bourbon over ice. It was good stuff, a small-batch Kentucky bourbon called Knob Creek.

Sam placed one of the glasses in front of his host, who was now wide-awake and attentive. He looked largely as Sam had remembered him, with a head of thick white hair that was all but untamable and icy blue eyes that sparkled with a kind of fierce intelligence. There was an ugly scar under his right eye, white and purple and about two inches long. Sam had heard half a dozen different stories about that scar. All of them, he suspected, were wrong.

“Thank you kindly,” his host said, raising his glass briefly before taking a sip.

“You're more than welcome. It's your whiskey.”

“That it is. How long has it been, Sam?”

“Almost five years.”

Sam had known Earl Holly since his first post in the Foreign Service. In Islamabad almost twenty-five years ago, Sam had been the junior guy in the political section and Earl had been the CIA station chief. Holly had taken a shine to Sam and he had brought him in on meetings that had given Sam a new and richer understanding of how things in Pakistan actually worked. Through Holly's patronage, Sam had developed a network of contacts and connections well beyond what a junior officer could ordinarily expect to achieve. As a result, Sam had started to build a reputation as an up-and-comer, a potential that he had manifestly failed to fulfill.

The Islamabad assignment had led to stints in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Karachi. Often, his career path had intercepted with Holly's. Earl had bounced back and forth between South Asia and Washington. But while Sam's responsibilities were open and straightforward, Earl had been part of the secretive puzzle palace of Cold War espionage. He had cut his teeth on the 1965 war between India and Pakistan that had threatened to embroil the United States and the Soviet Union in a potentially catastrophic proxy conflict. Later, he had played a key role in arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan, precipitating a humiliating Soviet withdrawal from South Asia and contributing to the eventual collapse of the USSR. In D.C., Earl had occupied a succession of senior intelligence positions, eventually rising to deputy director of the clandestine service before age and a power play on the part of a rival in the DNI's office had forced him into retirement.

“The fish will never see me coming,” he had promised at his retirement party.

Sam had lost touch with Earl when he left D.C. and the South Asia policy universe. A North Carolina native and a proud Tarheel, Earl had once told him that he did not want to be one of those D.C. lifers who never realize when it's time to move on.

“When I'm gone, I'm gone,” he had explained.

Sam had had to call in a few favors to get Earl's current contact information. Earl liked his privacy. Even so, the word was that he had not broken completely with his former life. A CIA contact told Sam that Earl had kept his own private network active. The same contact had warned him that Earl was more interested in the bourbon bottle than the dusty fishing rod Sam had spotted propped up against the wall in the kitchen.

Half-soused and living like a mad hermit in the woods, Earl Holly still knew more about South Asia and, more important, about South Asia specialists in the intelligence community in Washington than any man alive. He knew where most of the bodies were buried, if only because he had interred so many of them himself. If anyone could help Sam tease apart the mystery of Panoptes, it was Earl.

“So what motivated you to make the long drive down here? To say nothing of finding me in the first place. You in trouble? I'll bet it's about a girl. It's always a girl.”

“It's partly about a girl,” Sam agreed with a grin.

“You need romantic advice? Well, you've come to the right place.” Earl took another snort of bourbon and set the glass to rest at the apex of his substantial belly.

Yeah, what woman could resist?

“I need your help with a puzzle,” Sam said instead.

“I'm good at puzzles.”

“You're the best.”

Sam laid out for Earl everything that he knew, from his discovery of the suspect NSA intercept to his conversation with Quick Sands at Krittenbrink's funeral.

“I'm sorry about Andy,” Earl said, when Sam had finished. “I didn't know him. He came in after I was already out. But I heard good things from some of my old friends, and I know that you and he were close.”

“Thanks. We were. And what happened to him was my fault. I never should have gotten him involved in this. Andy's death was a tragedy. But if Quick was right, it was more than that. It was premeditated murder.”

Earl closed his eyes for a moment as though deep in thought. Without opening his eyes, he reached sure-handed for the tumbler he had set back on the coffee table and took another generous sip of the Knob Creek.

“Tell me more about Argus Systems.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Who owns it. Who runs it. How profitable is it. What kind of ties does the management have to the government. And whatever else you think might be of value.”

“Argus is privately held and the owner of record is a shell company in Bermuda. I did a little digging around before I took the job, and word was that the initial financing for Argus came from a VC firm called Perseus Capital.”

“Argus. Perseus. Panoptes. Someone really likes their Greeks.”

“That's modern Washington. Romans who think they're Greeks.”

Earl chuckled and poured himself another two fingers of bourbon.

“What about management?”

“The CEO is a guy named Garret Spears. Ex-military. Former Special Forces. Spent some time in North Africa but more time in South Arlington. He's been with Argus from the beginning. Very smooth and very, very well connected.”

“To whom?”

“I'm not sure,” Sam admitted. “At least I don't know who his primary patron is inside the Lord administration. He had the connections to get a very lucrative contract to provide intel and analysis on South Asia. That's why they brought me on.”

“The contract is for both collection and analysis?”

“That's right.”

“So who's doing the collection part?”

“There's a group within Argus that operates in their own private universe. They sure don't look like analysts. Or talk like analysts, for that matter.”

“Former Agency?”

“Military, I think. Maybe some PSYOPs types and certainly some guys who were former Special Forces. The head of the unit is a guy named Weeder.”

“John Weeder?”

“Yeah.”

“Ex-navy?”

“Former SEAL, I believe. Same as Spears.”

“Maybe at one point. After that, he worked for a . . . darker . . . part of the SpecOps world.”

“Do you know him?”

“I met him once. It was like being introduced to Death at a cocktail party. He has a reputation, and I'm familiar with at least some of the accomplishments on his résumé. He is not a nice man.”

“No,” Sam agreed. “He is not.”

Earl sat silently for a minute, and Sam could almost see the gears turning in his head. Earl Holly had a class-A brain. Alcohol may have dulled the edge a bit, but he was still plenty sharp.

“Let's look at Panoptes for a moment,” Earl said, when the critical components seemed finally to have meshed. “The program seems aimed at driving India and Pakistan closer to war, maybe even right over the edge into nuclear Armageddon. Who in their right mind would want to do such a thing?”

It seemed to be a rhetorical question, as though he already knew the answer and he was just walking Sam forward to the same conclusion.

“In their right mind? No one I can think of.”

“Commander Weeder's involvement leads me to a conclusion that I don't especially like.”

“Which is?”

“Tell me. Have you ever heard of a group called the Stoics?”

“More Greeks? It was a school of philosophy in Athens. Wasn't it Zeno who founded it?”

“Ah, the value of a liberal arts education. Yes, it was Zeno. But those aren't the Stoics I mean. There's an American group of the same name that has been on the fringes of policy making in Washington since long before you and I were around.”

“Like a club?”

“Of sorts. The membership is limited. They are people of influence who believe they have a special duty to lead the Republic through hard times, to make difficult choices on the basis of rational calculus and then take action.”

“How come I've never heard of them?”

“They prefer it that way. They do most of their work through cutouts and front companies. They do as little as possible directly.”

“And how come you
have
heard of them?”

“I have run into this group a number of times over the years. They had certain interests in Afghanistan, for example, that were not aligned with mine. They wanted to include the hardline Wahhabi elements in our train-and-equip program. I thought we could do the job without them and warned my superiors that we needed to look ten or twenty years down the road before bringing the crazies in on what we were doing. It wasn't even close. I lost. There's three thousand American dead from 9/11 who can attest to that.”