by David Stone
He seemed to falter here, going inward, as if seeing that day in all its obscenity and horror playing once again in his memory. They went on in silence, Cather’s face creased in regret and remorse. After a while, he recovered, began again.
“And then, for reasons that seemed sufficient at the time, we plunged into the jagged canyons of Afghanistan. We quickly disposed of the Taliban. As a result, our hubris fully in play, we conjured up an elective war in which we crushed the armed forces of Iraq in three weeks and then spent the next six years snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. So here we are today. The cycle repeats. We pursue our enemies in their gathering multitudes with neither judgment nor sustained commitment, wavering—in a metronomic, biannual regularity that greatly comforts our enemies—with every shift in Congress and at the White House.”
“We’re still in Afghanistan, sir. The NSA is still doing its work. The armed services are fully engaged and profoundly dedicated to the safety of this country. Perhaps you’re just . . . weary, sir. Perhaps you’ve seen too much.”
“Perhaps . . . perhaps. I’m an old man, arriving at the end of my long hallway lined with delusions, failures, crimes. Here, at the end of my life, I have come to realize that the only reliable law is the Law of Unintended Consequences. This new administration, for the most part, is neither stupid nor blindly partisan, although some of the younger staffers at the White House seem to think it clever to act like junkyard dogs, as if political combat were the same as actual combat. But, then, when the young Turks in any new government aren’t prating to their elders, they’re preening in their shaving mirrors. They all share the same delusions of adequacy. The previous administration persuaded itself that it had the power to impose a kind of Junior League Republicanism on murderous tribal theocracies. The new one imagines that it can impose the asinine Marcusian sophistries of Noam Chomsky and the Harvard Faculty of Humanities on the people of America, as if Socialism had not already been tried many times before only to collapse in ruins, frequently very bloody ruins. And God only knows what sort of grotesque ideological calliope the next army of enthusiasts will ride in on, horns blatting and banners ablaze. My consolation is that I’ll probably not be around when the wheels fall off once again.”
The last was said in a fading whisper, and they went on for a time in silence. Nikki could feel a tremble in the old man’s arm, and a sheen of perspiration had come out on his sallow cheeks. But she felt compelled to wait him out and not to insult an old Cold Warrior with her concerns about his health. They reached a corner, and Cather hesitated at the crosswalk, looking off toward a small parkette sheltering under an ancient stand of live oaks.
“Look,” he said. “There’s shade there. Do you mind if we . . . What did Stonewall Jackson say . . . ?”
“ ‘Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees’?” said Nikki softly.
Cather turned and beamed down on her, his cold eyes softening. “You give me heart, young woman. Let us do that.”
By the time they reached a little wooden bench, his cheeks were quite damp, and the tremor in his forearm had spread to the rest of his skeletal frame. Nikki got him seated, looking over her shoulder at the Crown Vic, which had pulled up by the curb. Then a tinny radio voice came out of Cather’s pocket, a slow Southern drawl, but packed with affection and worry.
“You okay, boss? You need anything?”
Cather didn’t bother pulling out the walkie-talkie, content to wave a bony hand at his driver in a dismissive gesture and then patting the bench beside him. Nikki sat down close to him, aware of the fever heat coming off Cather’s body.
He was not at all okay.
Cather took a folded linen handkerchief out of his suit jacket, dabbed his cheeks, refolded it carefully, and put it away.
“Stop looking at me like that, girl. I’m not going to keel over and die on you.”
Nikki smiled.
“Am I looking at you like that, sir?”
“Yes. I’m getting it a lot lately. As if I were being fitted for a shroud.”
“In my case, would that be the Shroud of Turrin?”
His response was alarming. He put his head back, closed his eyes, the tendons on his neck stood out, his mouth opened slightly, his body seemed to undergo a series of short, sharp contractions, and he began to emit a number of dry croaks. After a moment she realized that he was laughing. He looked like a pterodactyl swallowing a frog. He did this for a while longer, she endured it. He subsided, and patted the back of her hand.
“Very good, child. I like a girl with sass. My wife was very much a girl with sass. Dear Eleanor. How I miss her . . . Well, the afternoon is fleeting, and I have not yet begun to make my position plain. You’ll forgive me for enjoying the company of a beautiful young woman for a while.”
Nikki, whose father and mother had moved back to Friuli a year ago, was surprised to find that she was actually enjoying the company of this legendary old spy.
“Not at all. I’m quite happy to sit with you, sir.”
He gave her a look with some warning in it.
“Don’t misjudge me, Nikki . . . May I call you Nikki?”
“Please.”
“Don’t mistake me for a kindly old uncle. I’ve sent many young people every bit as bright and beautiful as you off to die ugly and ultimately futile deaths in terrible places, often in the service of policies that turned out to be either venal or idiotic. I may be doing that again right now.”
A pause while he gathered his thoughts. The second Crown Victoria had taken up a position on the far side of the street, and two squared-off crew cuts in baggy suits were walking under the trees a few yards away, the crackle of their radios a tinny insectile chittering in the pollen-thick haze of late afternoon.
“So I come, by my usual roundabout way, to the crux of the matter, Nikki. At this point, it is only fair to caution you that I am about to reveal some classified matters to you and that your continued attention from this point on will imply an acceptance of the consequences of privileged information.”
Here he fixed her with his pale blue eyes.
“Shall I go on?”
Stop now, she was thinking to herself. He is not a kindly old uncle. Say thanks so much, but I think not, and slowly back away.
For reasons she was never able to explain to herself afterward, she did not say or do this. Cather waited another beat, took her silence for assent, and went on.
“I’ve spoken of how America seems to lurch. We are in the midst of such a period now. We, the intelligence community, have become the object of scorn on the part of the new powers. This has happened before—the Church commission, the Clinton years. I need not retail all this for you since you know the history as well as I do. But this scorn, this taste for . . . I believe the phrase in vogue is truth commissions . . . as if the average senator would not recoil from the truth as a vampire recoils from the crucifix. And now we have another of these pestilential ‘Special Prosecutors.’ My lawyer informs me that I can expect to be subpoenaed later this year for acts carried out by members of Clandestine Services under my watch. All of this is having a terrible effect on our rank-and-file officers. I refer here to my department, but I’m sure these threats of retroactive prosecution for acts carried out on the instructions of previous Presidents must be having the same effect at the NSA.”
“Not to the same extent, since we’re not an operational arm. I do think this is partly the reason why my boss has taken a leave. He found the idea of retroactive prosecutions . . .”
Here she searched for a phrase that would tactfully convey the force of Hank Brocius’s fury at the idea, which was literally volcanic and involved the use of phrases such as ‘gutless peacenik scumbags’ and ‘hippy-dippy, draft-dodging Bolsheviks.’ ”
Finally she settled on this: “He found them a bit . . . galling, sir.”
“ ‘Galling,’ ” said Cather, who knew the man better than she did. “Yes, Hank would find this galling, as do I. In th
e name of self-righteousness and moral preening, the new powers seem ready to destroy the morale—the operational fire—of the intelligence community, and they may succeed. I’m using up most of what little power that remains to me in various attempts to protect my most vulnerable men and women, which includes all seventeen people in my Cleaners Unit. Well, now we come to it.”
Cather stopped again, giving Nikki a searching look as if to reaffirm the trust he was about to place in her and her acceptance of the consequences.
Nikki remained silent. He went on.
“Nikki, I believe you’re familiar with one of my Cleaners, a young man, an ex-Special Forces captain, named Micah Dalton?”
“Yes, sir. He was active in Chicago. And it was in connection with an inquiry of his that I went to Santorini and Istanbul last winter.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that. This is partly why I am here tugging on your sleeve this afternoon. And what is your professional opinion of this young man?”
“I think,” she said, stiffening, “that he’s one of the best field operators America has. He’s intelligent, he has courage—”
Cather held up a hand.
“I concur, although he can also be . . . spectacular. His methods lack a sense of proportion. He’s given to vendetta—”
“So’s my whole family, sir. We’re Italians.”
“Yes, I understand. Personally, I think the unreasoned pursuit of vendetta can be detrimental to the overarching mission of the intelligence branch . . . But your point is well taken. You’d be sorry, then, to hear that he has been thrown to the Mossad?”
“ ‘ Thrown’?”
“Yes. Quite literally. Here, I have something for you.”
He opened his palm. Resting in it was a small Sony Micro Vault. He offered it to her. She took it, looking into his eyes and seeing something there beside disease and disillusionment.
Cather was burning with anger.
“This device contains a highly classified document. In it, a woman named Mariah Vale . . . Perhaps you know of her?”
“Yes, sir,” she said, keeping her expression blank. “Hank Brocius speaks of her often.”
Cather showed his teeth.
“I would imagine he does. Miss Vale is now effectively in the position of Grand Inquisitor for the CIA, with the de facto support of the new administration. I know she acts in what she believes to be the best interests of the nation, but she is quite unsuited to sit in judgment upon operational issues. She is far too . . . fastidious. In her soul, she is convinced that if America really were a kinder, gentler place, the nation would have no enemies abroad and no dissent at home. In her view, we invite, through our aggression and arrogance, the hiss and enmity of the world. So she has set out to scour the CIA, to rid it—by any means available—of ‘rogue agents’ and ‘opportunistic sadists,’ thereby saving the Agency and the nation’s honor. As an illustration of her tactics, the document contained in this flash drive is Miss Vale’s summary of events that took place in Vienna over the last few hours. It will not surprise you that the events were . . . spectacular . . . and that our Mr. Dalton was right in the middle of it.”
“Vienna? There was a terrorist bombing in Vienna, wasn’t there? I saw something about it on Intelinet.”
“It’s being described as such, yes. The reality is rather less clear. A brown Saab blew up close to Leopoldsberg. The narrative in the device will lay out Miss Vale’s official view for you. I will simply sketch in the outlines. As I understand it, Dalton was on an assignment in Bonn and that he had been contacted by—or had initiated a contact with—an Israeli named Issadore Galan, retired Mossad, now in the employ of the Carabinieri in Venice. We believe, but do not know, that a meeting was arranged, to take place in the city of Vienna. Dalton arrived in Vienna two days ago. Our inference is that the meeting with Galan was to be conducted on what we have all come to describe as Moscow Rules, a term of art for which we may thank Mr. Le Carré. You are familiar with this sort of defensive tradecraft, I’m sure?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, going on to describe, in a general way, the events of the evening: Dalton’s realization that he was being watched, his isolation of Veronika Miklas. Nikki listened with a tightening throat, sensing that something irrevocable had happened and that perhaps this time Dalton had simply gone too far. Cather rolled onward, his voice gathering power as the narrative developed, his frustration clear.
“At this point, the story becomes rather murky. According to the preliminary report prepared by Mariah Vale—you have a complete version in this device—there was some sort of confrontation at Miss Miklas’s flat in the suburbs of Vienna. The body of a man named Yusef Akhmediar, a Hungarian Muslim who was known to the OSE—I gather he was some sort of freelance footpad who did a variety of unclean things for whatever agency wished to keep its shirt cuffs tidy . . . In any case, his body was discovered—I’m told it declared itself in the heat of the morning—dumped in a large bin at the back of Miss Miklas’s apartment building. You will not be squeamish if I tell you that he had been killed by the rather innovative method of having an electric curling iron thrust through his left eye and deep into his brain. There is some forensic evidence that he did not die at once, and that his passing was facilitated to a degree by having the electric current turned on, which quite literally cooked his brains.”
“Spectacular,” she said, with a grimace.
Cather nodded.
“Quite in the Dalton style, yes. Setting that aside, the pair—for we are now to consider Miss Miklas to be a willing accomplice—were next seen the following morning at Leopoldsberg, a hilltop cathedral-fortress close by the curve of the Danube in the northern suburbs of Vienna. Here the picture becomes even cloudier. From what I have been able to gather, the main camera was out of commission that morning, perhaps intentionally disabled, but other cameras mounted on a nearby retaining wall show a series of images: Dalton’s vehicle, a large black Benz, driven by Miss Miklas with Dalton in the passenger seat, cruises slowly past an old brown Saab and parks in a slot a few rows away.”
“Are people allowed to park overnight? In that lot?”
“A good question. I do not know the answer to that.”
“Is there any video of the Saab arriving? The time?”
“As I understand it, we have all the available video, with the exception of the central camera, which, as I mentioned, has somehow ‘malfunctioned. ’ To continue, Dalton gets out, approaches the Saab, seems to examine it, and then goes around to the rear, where he opens the trunk. The camera does not allow us a view of what he saw there, but it occupied him for over two minutes. He pulls something from the trunk—a thin white tube—examines it, and now events move rather quickly. He slams the trunk, runs around to the driver’s door, and then to the front, where he opens the hood. He makes a call on his cell phone. He then manages to get the engine running. He breaks a window, jumps behind the wheel, maneuvers the Saab through the crowds, drives it for some distance down the lane, and now he is out of sight of the security cameras. A police car sets off in pursuit of what they viewed as a car theft. They reach a curve in the road, and their vehicle is enveloped in a large explosion, originating from the Saab, which Dalton had parked in a ditch by the side of the road.”
Nikki began to speak, but Cather lifted a palm.
“Allow me to tell the tale, my dear, and then I would greatly value your analysis. The blast radius is very large. The driver is killed, and two others are severely burned. The brown Saab is totally engulfed in flames. Subsequent inquiries establish that the Benz is also missing, having left the parking area shortly after Dalton drove the Saab through the gates. Firefighters arrive. The fires are quelled. The Saab is examined. A body is found in the trunk, which dental records establish as being the charred remains of Issadore Galan. Issadore Galan was the registered owner of the Saab. How would you address this scenario?”
Nikki gave it some thought.
“First of all, who was watching Dalton an
d why?”
“Excellent question. He was being observed by a unit of the OSE known as the Overwatch Service. They state that the request to have Dalton monitored came from Interpol and was authorized by the OSE as part of a reciprocal intelligence-gathering agreement the Austrians signed several years ago.”
“Has anyone asked Interpol why they wanted Dalton monitored?”
“Our Bureau of Diplomatic Security agents formally requested an explanation from Interpol. The people at Interpol declined to provide any details, citing a confidential agreement with a ‘third party.’ The suggestion was made that the surveillance was merely a routine training drill and that Dalton was selected merely because he was a known foreign agent and would provide a challenging target. This entirely unsatisfactory reply seems to have ended the matter, as far as Miss Vale is concerned.”
