Noble Sanction

by William Miller

  Dulles’s secretary peered at them over half-moon spectacles. She was a formidable black woman with streaks of early gray in her hair. “He’s waiting for you.”

  Something in her tone sent a shiver up Ezra’s spine. The knot in his stomach turned to a hard lump. His legs felt like wet noodles. He wanted Gwen to go first, but she was too slow on the crutches, so he summoned up his courage and raised a fist to knock.

  “Go on in,” the secretary said. “He knows you’re coming.”

  Ezra turned the knob, feeling like a small boy invading the sanctity of his father’s bedroom.

  The office looked like the private chambers of an eccentric genius or a madman—maybe both. The overpowering stench of cigarettes clung to every surface, despite Langley’s strict policy against smoking. One entire wall was a spider’s web of red string tying together a collection of intelligence reports and newspaper clippings. At the center of the vast web was a black-and-white silhouette with a question mark. The rest of the office was buried under piles of reports with handwritten notes in Wizard’s spidery scrawl. The DDO was old school. He eschewed computers in favor of his own private system, which seemed to include a lot of sticky notes. Top secret information was strewn about the office on yellow stickies and three-by-five cards. It was such a profusion of raw intelligence, staffers jokingly claimed they would have to burn the office to the ground to prevent security leaks when Wizard finally retired.

  Dulles sat hunched over his desk, a chain-smoking vulture, half hidden by tottering piles of paperwork. His suit had gone out of style with Elvis Presley and a Chesterfield dangled from one corner of the gash that served as his mouth. He waved them in without looking up from a report he was reading.

  “Have a seat,” he rasped.

  Ezra had to move a stack of dossiers out of a chair for Gwen. He started to pile the folders on top of a filing cabinet but Wizard said, “Not there.”

  Instead, Ezra balanced them on the corner of Wizard’s desk. Gwen lowered herself onto the seat. Ezra stood. He wasn’t sure what to do with his hands. First he hooked his fingers in his pockets, but decided that might be disrespectful and clasped them behind his back instead like a soldier at parade rest.

  Wizard took the cigarette from his mouth, exhaled a cloud of smoke, tapped ash into a cut-glass tray full of butts and returned the cigarette to his lips, without ever taking his eyes off the report. His unruly brows pinched and his mouth moved silently as he read, causing the glowing tip of the cigarette to jump and dip.

  They waited.

  He finished reading, closed the file, noticed a spot of ash on his tie and brushed it off before looking up. “How’re you feeling, young lady?”

  “Good.” She pushed the glasses up the bridge of her nose. “I’m feeling just fine, sir. Thanks for asking.”

  Wizard scratched one eyebrow with a nicotine-stained fingertip. “I understand you two were instrumental in uncovering the illegal operations of Frank Bonner and Paris Station.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gwen and Ezra answered in unison.

  “And that you hacked the database in the process.”

  Ezra swallowed hard. “We were ordered to do that, sir.”

  “We thought we were acting under authorization from acting DDO Coughlin,” Gwen added.

  “No one’s ever done that before,” Wizard muttered to himself while rifling a stack of papers. “Technically, it’s a federal crime.”

  “Sir,” Gwen scooted to the edge of her seat. “The director cleared us of any wrongdoing.”

  Ezra tried to speak up but the words refused to come out. He felt rooted to the cigarette-burned carpet.

  “Relax, Ms. Witwicky.” Wizard waved away her concern. “I didn’t bring you up here to discipline you. I’m putting together an operation and I need a couple of bright young go-getters like yourselves.”

  Ezra let out a breath. Gwen gave a nervous laugh that died on her lips.

  Wizard brought out two sheets of paper and passed them over the desk. “Here are your new marching orders. Sign and date them.”

  Ezra scrawled his signature on the bottom without looking, added the date and passed it back, feeling like a man who’d just got a second lease on life. Gwen, of course, read over the whole document. While she examined the fine print, Ezra’s attention strayed to the wall. He asked, “What is all this, sir?”

  Wizard leaned back and studied him for a long moment before saying, “That, young man, represents my life’s work.”

  Chapter Seven

  Wizard cranked himself out of his chair with a series of tired grunts, like an old engine struggling to turn over. He jabbed the glowing tip of his cigarette at the wall. “What you see here represents nearly forty years of counterintelligence work. Four decades of sifting the truth from all the lies and disinformation. To the untrained eye, it looks like so much randomness—that’s the way it’s meant to look—but there are clues hidden in there for the careful observer.

  “For years now, I’ve been seeing a pattern in world affairs—a connecting thread tying together seemingly unrelated events. It all started in ’79 with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power. That’s when I first began to suspect there was a guiding hand, an unseen force, manipulating events from the shadows. But to what purpose, I couldn’t fathom. He’s a master of subtle manipulation, whoever he is, and he plays a long game. Some of his machinations take years, even decades, but I’ve learned to recognize his fingerprints in the smallest details.”

  The DDO went on talking, more to himself than Ezra or Gwen. His steely gaze roamed over the wall while ribbons of smoke trailed from his cigarette. A rope of ash dropped to the threadbare carpet unnoticed.

  Gwen watched the bent and wizened old figure, wondering if he was coming unglued. He wouldn’t be the first operations officer to lose his marbles. The world of covert intelligence was a complex labyrinth of lies and deceit, a wilderness of mirrors, where no one was above suspicion. Play the game long enough and you start seeing double agents in every shadow. Every scrap of information is possible disinformation. When that happened, it was time to pack it in, but crazy people rarely know they’re crazy. Some had to be forced into retirement. Others had to be institutionalized. Rumor had it there was a top-secret CIA nut house for spooks who lost their grip on reality. According to legend, some of the Company’s top spymasters spent their twilight years in padded cells. Gwen didn’t want to offend Wizard—she had tremendous respect for him—so she chose her words carefully. “And you think this… criminal mastermind… is behind all of these events?”

  A smile hitched up one side of his weathered face. “You’re wondering if Wizard has finally scrambled his noodle.”

  Gwen shook her head. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first.” Wizard noticed his cigarette had burned down to the filter and he stabbed it out. “A lot of people think I’ve outlived my usefulness. Foster thought I should be put out to pasture. He wasn’t alone either. Of course, he was convicted of conspiracy and treason. It goes to show you…”

  What it showed, Wizard never did say. He crossed behind his desk and lit another cigarette. “Starting now, you two are going to be working directly for me. I’m taking you off whatever you had going, effective immediately.”

  Ezra’s relief at not being in trouble quickly evaporated. He glanced at the tangled web of intelligence reports tacked to the wall and said, “What exactly is it you want us to do, sir?”

  Wizard handed them a newspaper article about a dead Secret Service agent. Ezra and Gwen put their heads together and read. The agent, P. Arthur Fellows, had been found hanging in a closet of the Hamilton Hotel on K Street. Authorities were ruling it an accidental death.

  Gwen said, “Looks like he strangled himself.”

  Wizard brought them up to speed on his sushi dinner before passing a folder across the desk. The tan cover was marked with a red slash and stamped eyes only. “I had our people in imgint scour the traffic cams around the hotel.
They came up with this.”

  imgint is short for image intelligence. The experts who work in the imgint shop can look at satellite photos from space and tell you if an Arab man in baggy pajamas has a gun in his pocket or just a roll of dinars. During the Cold War, they were instrumental in keeping track of Russia’s missile trains. The shop had diminished with the advent of heat signature and X-ray technology, but they’re still a highly valued department within the halls of Langley. Ezra opened the folder and found a grainy photo of a woman leaving the Hamilton.

  “The same woman I saw him with at Sushi Gakyu,” Wizard told them.

  Gwen said, “And you think she killed him?”

  Wizard blew smoke. “She might be a prostitute. DC police are checking into that. It’s possible this whole thing is coincidence. Maybe her john died, she got scared and split. But if she did, she hung around forty minutes and cleaned the room first. The coroner puts the time of death at 7:20 in the p.m. She didn’t leave until almost eight.”

  Ezra asked, “Was his money still in his wallet?”

  “No, she cleaned him out,” Wizard admitted. “But that doesn’t prove anything. If she’s a pro she would take his money out of desperation, and a hired assassin would take the money to make it look like she was a hooker.”

  “So either way, she could still be an assassin,” Gwen said.

  Wizard nodded. “I want you two to walk back the cat on this mystery woman.”

  Gwen took the grainy traffic-cam photo from Ezra and puffed out her cheeks. “Where do you want us to start, sir?”

  “Until we know otherwise, operate under the assumption that she’s a hired assassin,” Wizard told them. “Dig through FBI and Interpol databases. See if you can find a match. I want to know who she is and where she went after she left the hotel.”

  “Understood,” Gwen said.

  “We’re on it,” Ezra assured him

  “It goes without saying, but this is considered top secret. Don’t breathe a word of it to anyone outside this circle,” Wizard told them. “Find an unused operation room and set up shop. I want regular updates.”

  “Yes, sir,” they chorused before making their way down the hall to the first available mission control room. Ezra swiped through the door and Gwen swatted the light switch. Buzzing fluorescents flickered to life. Manhattan efficiency apartments have more square footage. The overripe smell of mold was enough to make Gwen’s eyes water. A grime-encrusted coffee machine stood on a table in the corner and a bloated ceiling tile looked ready to give birth. The water-stained tile signaled a leak that had yet to be repaired. Probably hadn’t even been reported. Protocol dictated Ezra and Gwen alert maintenance staff, but that meant repairmen coming and going while they conducted a top-secret operation. Instead they ignored the leak, powered up the computer terminals, and logged on to the server.

  The last team to use the room had made off with the seating so Ezra had to steal a pair of rolling chairs from a nearby break room. Gwen leaned her crutches against her work station and plopped down in front of a computer. “Why do these things keep happening to us?”

  “You feeling the same way I do?” Ezra asked.

  She nodded. “Like we just stepped in it.”

  Ezra said, “Wizard is either a certifiable genius or just plain certifiable.”

  “I’m leaning toward the latter,” Gwen said. “The guy is ancient. He should have retired a decade ago and taken up golf. Instead, he’s got us chasing ghosts.”

  “Let’s just ID this hooker and be done with it,” Ezra said.

  Chapter Eight

  Noble sat in a pew of the First United Methodist Church in downtown Saint Petersburg, staring up at a stained-glass reproduction of The Last Supper. The drowsy smell of incense hung thick in the air. Late afternoon sunlight—or was it early morning?—filtered in through the stained glass and combined with the eerie stillness to give the place a surreal, almost dreamlike, quality. Noble had been there since yesterday, or maybe it was the day before. His thoughts were jumbled. Time seemed to lag and leap. He propped his forearms on the pew in front of him and laced his fingers together. Stubble covered his cheeks and shaggy hair scraped the collar of his polo shirt. He had shed fifteen pounds since February—fifteen pounds he couldn’t afford to lose—and dark eyes stared out of deep sockets set in a gaunt face. He fixed his gaze on the reproduction of Da Vinci’s masterpiece and his mouth twisted into an ugly frown.

  Why her? Noble asked. Why her? Why not me?

  Silence was his only answer.

  Noble had come here every morning since Sam died. He sat in the same hardwood pew, asking the same questions, and got the same answers. He drank himself to sleep most nights and woke up the next morning with a splitting headache and a hole in his chest where his heart should have been. He knew what he was doing was wrong. He knew he was only numbing the pain. Sooner or later he would have to deal with it, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t strong enough. Sam’s death had left an emptiness deep inside him, a dark vacuum sucking up all the light. He needed to confront her death and find a way to cope but the wound was too raw.

  Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her in those last precious seconds before she died.

  Noble pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Don’t go there.”

  He tried to pull himself out of the tailspin, but it was no good. Before he knew it, he was back on the river, feeling the deck roll beneath his feet and the icy spray hit him in the face. He saw Sam appear around the corner of the pilothouse. He tried to yell, tried to warn her, but he was too late. He heard the sharp whip-crack of the pistol and saw her eyes go wide. Then she was tumbling over the railing and into the dark waters. He heard the splash. It was like an invisible knife ripping his heart open.

  Noble raked a hand through his hair and took a few deep breaths. He tried to force the images out, but they refused to go. The picture of Sam’s face just before she fell was etched into his memory. Tears welled up in his eyes and doubled his vision. He didn’t bother to wipe them away. They’d just keep right on coming. He turned his attention back to the stained-glass image of Christ.

  Why? Why did you let this happen? Why did she have to die? Speak to me!

  His phone started vibrating. He dug it from his pocket and answered with a blunt, “Noble.”

  “Jake? Albert Dulles here. How you holding up, son?”

  It was an effort to keep his voice steady. “Okay, I guess.” After a beat he admitted, “I’ve been better.”

  “I was sorry to hear about Samantha Gunn,” Wizard croaked out. “She was a good soldier. I wish I had been there. Maybe things would have turned out different.”

  Noble couldn’t find any words. A thorny fist had a grip on his vocal cords and he fought back a fresh wave of tears.

  Wizard took a drag from a cigarette—Noble heard the paper crackle—and exhaled. “You can’t blame yourself, Jake.”

  “With all due respect, sir … I’m the only one to blame.”

  “I been where you are, Jake. I’ve lost a lot of good men. In Nam, I gave the orders that sent twenty-two soldiers to their deaths. I lost seven more during the Cold War. I’m not going to tell you it gets easier. It doesn’t. You’ve got a choice to make: You can get back in the saddle or spend every night on that boat, drinking yourself to death.”

  “How did you—” Noble started to ask.

  “I told you,” Wizard cut him off. “I’ve been there. I know what you’re going through. I know all the guilt and the doubt and the anger and confusion. I know what it’s like to drink yourself to sleep every night and wake up in the morning wondering if you’ve got the courage to eat a bullet, because that’s the only thing that will make the pain stop. But you can beat this, Jake. I know you can. You just have to get back in the game.”

  Noble passed a hand over his face. Everything Wizard said was right but hearing it only pissed Noble off. He said, “You didn’t call to check up on me.”

  “I’ve got a j
ob for you,” Wizard said. “You interested?”

  Noble sat there thinking. He was in no condition to work. He said, “I’m not your guy, sir. Find someone else.”

  “A Secret Service agent named P. Arthur Fellows was murdered three nights ago,” Wizard told him. “The killer made it look like an accident. DC police have already tied off the investigation.”

  Curiosity got the better of him and Noble asked, “You got a line on the killer?”

  “She’s an international assassin known only as the Angel of Death.”

  “Sounds like a comic book character,” Noble commented.

  “She’s wanted for six murders in six different countries and suspected of a dozen more,” Wizard said. “I need someone who can run her to ground and find out who paid her. I want to know who had Fellows killed and why.”

  Noble’s mind was already ticking over the problem. There was a puzzle in front of him—a mystery in need of an answer. Instinct did the rest. He asked, “Who’s running point on this?”

  “I’ve got operational command.”

  “Congressional oversight?” Noble asked.

  “Not yet,” Wizard admitted. “I want something solid before I climb the Hill for approval.”

  “I’ve been down this road before,” Noble told him.

  “She’ll be long gone by the time those spineless turds on the Hill motivate themselves to action,” Wizard said. “I need someone who can move fast and bend a few rules. I’ll give you all the support I can, but I’ve got to know right now: Are you up to it?”

  Noble chewed the inside of one cheek. He didn’t feel up to anything. He’d spent the last two months drinking, but maybe this was the answer he was looking for? At the very least it would keep him busy and right now, he needed to get his mind off Sam. He let out a breath. “I’m in.”