Death's Little Helpers

by Peter Spiegelman

  “But he worked for Marty Czerka?” A look of disdain came and went across Gromyko’s face, and he nodded. “How did you meet?” I asked.

  “He accosted Gilpin outside the office, but failed to notice that two of my men were with him at the time. They sent Gilpin upstairs and called me.”

  “And you questioned him— somewhat vigorously.” Gromyko said nothing. “And he told you … what?”

  “Everything he knew. Which was very little.”

  “But he told you he was working a missing persons case.”

  Gromyko nodded again. “Yes. He was looking for Gilpin’s half brother, Gregory Danes,” he said.

  “And he also told you who his client was?” I held my breath waiting for the answer.

  “Yes, he told me that too,” Gromyko said.

  “And?”

  “And now we agree that I have been helpful to you, yes, Mr. March?” His eyes narrowed again and caught mine. The breeze picked up and blew around a heavy scent of topsoil.

  “We agree.”

  “Just so we are not ahead of ourselves,” Gromyko said, and he smiled icily. “Jeremy Pflug. His client is named Jeremy Pflug.” Gromyko spelled it for me.

  “Who is he?”

  He shook his head. “Google him, Mr. March; you will find out all you need to know.”

  “You don’t know anything more about him than that?”

  Gromyko sighed. “I satisfied myself that Stevie was telling me what he believed was true. And Gilpin assured me that he has nothing to do with his brother, and that he knows nothing of this Pflug. And Gilpin knows better than to lie to me. So I satisfied myself that this matter did not concern me.

  “My business is growing rapidly, Mr. March, and it is demanding of my time. Where no clear need or benefit exists, I do not meddle in the affairs of others— a practice you would be wise to consider.” Gromyko straightened and checked his watch. “If there is nothing else … ?”

  “When did you have this talk with Stevie?”

  “Some time ago— ten days, perhaps, before your visit.”

  “Any more signs of a tail since your man saw that blue van?”

  “No,” he said, and looked at his watch again. “And now I must go.” His pale face was expressionless.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He nodded slowly. “Indeed,” he said, and he turned and went south, into the Italian garden. I watched him walk past the line of crab apple trees and pause near the Vanderbilt Gate. The willowy blond woman unfolded herself from a bench and drifted across the garden to join him. She was just his height, and she leaned into him and took his hand and whispered something in his ear. Gromyko nodded at whatever she said, and the blond woman clutched his arm and kissed him. A swatch of laughter, high and girlish, fluttered across the garden like a leaf. And then they were through the gate and out of sight.

  I sat on the stone bench and listened to the distant traffic sounds and thought for a while about the bargain I had struck with Gromyko. I wondered what he would ask in return for his favor and when he would ask it, and if our ideas about what was within reason would be even remotely similar. And what I would do if they weren’t. And what he would do. I shook my head. It was pointless to speculate now, pointless to worry; the deal was done and I had a name. When the time came, I’d pull my weight— one way or another— but right now I had a name. The sun was warm on my shoulders and the bench was warm beneath me, and in a minute or two the frost seeped from my arms and legs.

  I walked across the park to 96th Street, and caught a subway downtown. The Brill offices were still quiet. Neary was clean-shaven, clear-eyed, and blue-suited, and only mildly surprised to see me. I shut the office door.

  “There’s nothing yet on Stevie,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got a name.”

  “From who?” he asked.

  “From somebody reliable.”

  “Somebody who’s currently in one piece?”

  “He was the last time I saw him.”

  Neary smiled a little. “I’m relieved. What’s the name?”

  “Jeremy Pflug.” I spelled it for him, as Gromyko had for me. “No one I’ve heard of, but Google will reportedly tell us all we need to know.”

  Neary rolled over to his keyboard. “All we need to know for free, anyway, but it’s a place to start. Drag a chair over.”

  We were at it for two hours, at first on Google, then on a variety of subscription services, and finally in a proprietary Brill database. It may not have been everything there was to know about Jeremy Pflug, but it was enough— and it was strange.

  If you believed the overheated prose on the Web site of Scepter Intelligence, the company he had founded and of which he was president and chief executive, Jeremy Pflug was a larger-than-life character, a unique hybrid of Sir Richard Burton, Wild Bill Donovan, and the hero of a very thick paperback thriller.

  According to his corporate bio, Pflug was in his late forties, Ivy educated, and a polyglot, with graduate degrees in economics and international affairs. He was a veteran of the U.S. Navy, where he had been a lieutenant commander and served with Special Forces teams. After the navy, he did stints as a war correspondent, a CIA analyst, and a bond trader, all as prelude to founding Scepter. His hobbies included sailing, caving, and martial arts. There was no mention of his favorite color.

  There were many photos of Pflug on the Scepter Web site, in many valiant poses. There was Pflug as T. E. Lawrence, standing by a sand-pitted jeep, squinting out over a dusty steppe; swashbuckling Pflug, at the helm of a storm-tossed sailboat, squinting out over the merciless waves; Pflug as master of the universe, leaning insouciantly on a Bloomberg terminal, squinting out over a chaotic trading floor. There was Pflug the corporate pitchman, touting Scepter’s services to a clutch of rapt executives; Pflug the inspirational leader, exhorting a roomful of fresh-faced young suits; and Pflug the expert, lecturing some plump Rotarians about homeland security. In all of them, he looked tall and lean and, if not exactly handsome, then at least rugged, tough, and daring. The vanity was unabashed and amusing.

  The small portions of the Scepter site not devoted to Pflug himself were given over to a lot of drivel about the equivalence of commerce and war, the competitive advantage of knowledge, and the value of timely intelligence. It was unoriginal and sometimes incoherent stuff, heavily laced with— though not redeemed by— Pflug’s musings on warfare, strategy, and tactics, all of which were mangled paraphrasings of Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and Vince Lombardi. I read that Scepter was an intelligence firm for the new millennium but otherwise had no clue of what it did. Neary scanned the screen and shook his head. He laughed outright when we got to the other stuff.

  The other stuff came mostly from a lengthy article, published a couple of years back in an irreverent monthly magazine, on the qualifications of some of the experts engaged by the cable news channels to provide color commentary on the last war. One of those so-called experts was Jeremy Pflug, and there was apparently much less to him than met the eye.

  Starting with his academic background. Under the reporter’s close inspection, Pflug’s Ivy education became a freshman year in New Haven and a bachelor of arts from a West Coast diploma mill, the same fine institution that later awarded him his graduate degrees. The language skills consisted mainly of high-school Spanish, and— according to an unnamed source— the ability to bargain with hookers in French and German.

  Pflug’s claims of military service were slightly more legitimate. He had in fact been in the navy and had achieved the rank of lieutenant commander. But his service with Special Forces teams might more accurately have been termed service of Special Forces teams— as his primary duties had been those of a supply officer.

  His CV stretched the truth even thinner when it came to his career after the navy. His experience as a war correspondent amounted to six months as a mostly unpaid stringer for a now-defunct news service. His beat was Singapore— not exactly downtown Beirut, as the a
uthor of the magazine article pointed out. His claim to have been a CIA analyst was even more tenuous. In fact, Pflug was a temp at a DC consulting firm that was hired by the Agency to analyze administrative costs. Similarly, “bond trader” was Pflug’s spin on his nine months as a trader’s assistant at a second-rate broker-dealer in Baltimore. The article, apparently, marked the end of Pflug’s career in broadcast.

  The subscription services and the Brill database confirmed some of what was in the article but shed no light on Pflug’s company, Scepter Intelligence. As it was a privately held firm, there was no information available on its other officers, its revenues, its employees, or its clients, and what little we did come across was a rehash of what was on their Web site:

  Offices in Washington, New York, and London. Practice areas include financial services, technology, media, and energy. Strategic and tactical engagements.

  Neary leaned back in his chair and stretched. “I’ve got to get this guy to work on my résumé,” he said, laughing. “A little tweaking, and it can read like I was attorney general.”

  “Or even postmaster general. But who is this guy, and what does he actually do? And what’s his interest in Danes?”

  “Assuming it is his interest,” Neary said.

  “As opposed to … ?”

  “As opposed to a client’s interest.”

  “Another fucking cutout … great.” I shook my head. “So who’s his client, and what the hell does he want with Danes?”

  Neary smiled. “First things first,” he said. “Let’s start with who this guy is and what he does. What was the name of the magazine reporter?”

  I looked down at my pad. “George L. Gerber, out of LA,” I read.

  Neary’s fingers were busy again and he was quiet for a moment, reading his screen. “There we go. Think it’s too early to call out West?” But he was already working the phone.

  It wasn’t too early for George L. Gerber. He was awake and alert over the phone speaker, and there was a prickly hint of Brooklyn in his voice. But he was pleasant enough, until we told him what we wanted to talk about. Then there was silence on the line, followed by some very careful questions about who we were. We gave him answers, and he said he’d call us back. Neary started to give him his direct number, but Gerber stopped him.

  “I’ll find the number for Brill in New York,” he said. “If I can’t reach you there, I don’t want to talk to you.” Five minutes later he was on the line again.

  “So what’s your interest in him?” Gerber asked. There was still plenty of caution in his voice.

  “We tripped across him in a case we’re working,” Neary said. “We’re looking for some background on him and thought you might help us out. You’re the closest we’ve come to a Pflug expert.”

  “You got that right,” Gerber said, with a bitter laugh. “But if you read my article, you already know the important stuff— that he’s a lying, self-aggrandizing creep. I don’t know what I can add.”

  “What can you tell us about Scepter Intelligence?” I asked. “You didn’t say much about the company in your piece.”

  “Besides Pflug, there isn’t a lot to say about Scepter. I mean, Pflug is Scepter.”

  “Their Web site sure makes it sound that way,” Neary said. “Of course, it makes it sound like a lot of the civilized world depends on Pflug, just to hold things together.”

  Gerber didn’t laugh. “I wasn’t joking, Neary. He really is the company. I mean, from everything I learned, Pflug is the only employee of Scepter Intelligence.”

  Neary looked at me and I looked back, and we were quiet for a while. Gerber helped us out.

  “The Web site’s a Potemkin village, and all the offices— in DC and New York and London— they’re just serviced space. For a few hundred a month he gets a respectable address, a phone number, a receptionist, a place to get mail, and a decent conference room when he needs to have a meeting. As far as I could tell, the company mainly exists in Pflug’s condo, out in the northern Virginia burbs.”

  “So he does all the work?” I asked.

  “He’s more like a contractor. He gets the gigs and hires on whatever help he needs— day labor, specialists, even other companies— for however long he needs them. He manages them and slaps a big markup on every job.”

  “What kinds of jobs, George?” Neary asked. “What’s he selling, and who’s he selling it to?”

  Gerber snorted. “He calls it private intelligence and opposition research and a few other pretentious euphemisms, but what it is, is spying— dirty tricks, creeping and peeping, buying and selling secrets, smear campaigns— all that good stuff. Pflug’s a corporate spook, and despite what a creep he is— or maybe because of it— he’s a good one.” Neary looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

  “And his clients?” Neary asked.

  “He keeps that a secret,” Gerber said. “And the people and companies that buy his services tend not to talk about it much.”

  “You never ran across any of them doing your research?” Neary said.

  “The closest I came were some guys who did freelance work for him over the years. They’re how I first got on to what his business was really all about. Pflug never let them anywhere near clients, but they knew who their targets were. They wouldn’t share any names with me, no matter how many drinks I bought them— I think they were afraid of being implicated in anything— but two of them said the list included a lot of Wall Street assholes. And that’s a quote.”

  Neary and I looked at each other again. “Think we could have a chat with some of those guys?” I asked.

  Gerber laughed. “Sorry, boys, that’s how somebody like me loses all his reporter merit badges. Pardon my French, but no fucking way.”

  Neary shrugged, and we were quiet for a while, thinking.

  “How do you know he’s good at it?” I asked Gerber finally.

  “What?”

  “If you never spoke to any of his clients, how do you know that Pflug is good at his work?”

  There was a long silence on the phone speaker.

  “You still there, George?” Neary asked.

  “I’m here,” Gerber said. His voice was a little choked.

  Neary looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “You doing okay?” he said to the phone.

  “I’m all right,” Gerber said.

  “Did we hit a nerve, George?” Neary asked. “Was that a bad question?”

  Gerber coughed a little. “No, no, it was the right thing to ask,” he said. “It’s what I would’ve asked.” Another cough. “I know that Pflug is good at what he does because for a while, after that article came out, I was one of his targets.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Gerber sighed. “It was little shit at first: hang-up phone calls in the office and on my cell and at home. And then I began to notice that they were timed— just when I’d get to my desk in the morning, just when I’d get in my car, just when I’d get home— as if someone was watching me. Then my mail started getting fucked up. Bills came late, and the envelopes looked like they’d been tampered with. Some bills never came at all. Then one day I got no mail at all, just a mailbox filled with dog shit.

  “After that he moved on to the office. A woman down in sales started getting harassing e-mail— pornographic e-mail— that looked as if it was coming from my computer. From me. And just like the phone calls, they were timed; she’d only get them when I was at my desk. And then …” Gerber paused and coughed some more. “Then, my editor gets a fax— anonymous— that purports to be from an employee who’s too frightened to come forward directly. The fax tells him he should check out my computer, that I’ve been downloading all sorts of … pictures … of kids, for chrissakes …” Gerber paused again and sighed heavily.

  Neary spoke to him, and his voice was surprisingly gentle. “You must’ve had some idea where this was coming from, George. You must’ve thought of Pflug first thing.”

  “Of course I did,” Gerber said. “As soo
n as the phone calls started. And I told my editor and our lawyers and the cops about them right away. That’s probably what saved my ass. Because these e-mails and the shit they found on my computer— the pictures— they all looked like the real deal. And there were no signs of tampering, no traces of intrusion, no traces of anything— not on my computer, or my phones, or my mailbox. Nothing.”

  “When you told the police about the phone calls, did they put traps on your line?” Neary asked.

  “Sure they did, at which point the calls stopped. And that was the pattern: I was always playing catch-up. As soon as I talked to the postal inspectors about my mail, the mail tampering stopped and the e-mail shit started. When that happened, our tech guys put some sort of monitor on my account, after which there were no more harassing messages. And then my boss got the fax.”

  “Did anybody ever confront Pflug?”

  “Several times. He claimed to have no knowledge of anything, of course, and he could prove he was on the other side of the country when this shit was happening. There was no evidence that pointed to him— or to anyone else, for that matter.”

  “Are you sure it was Pflug?” I asked.

  Gerber was quiet again and I worried that I’d angered him, but when he spoke his voice was soft.

  “After the business with the fax and the pictures, things went quiet. A week, a month, two months go by and nothing happens, and I’m thinking it’s finally over. And then …” Gerber coughed softly a few times and took a deep breath. “Then one night I come home and my dog— his name was Murrow— is gone. He was a fat old Lab, arthritic and deaf and half blind, who’d sleep all day in the back yard. He barely got himself up to take a leak anymore, and on his best day he couldn’t have jumped my fence, any more than he could’ve opened the gate by himself. But he was gone.

  “I called the cops, and ten minutes later a prowl car came to my house. They took me up the ridge to the edge of a ravine, and … down below was Murrow.” He paused again and sniffed. “A jogger had phoned it in just an hour before, and she was all freaked out. And why not? I mean, how often do you see a headless dog?”