Rattlesnake

by Andy Maslen

  Baines Christie had worked for the CIA for thirty years. He’d started out as a junior field agent, but moved swiftly into secret paramilitary operations with the Special Operations Group, where his tactical brain, ruthlessness, and skill with weapons offered greater return on the Agency’s investment. He’d trained Contras in Nicaragua in 1981, advised Thai Special Forces during their drug war the following year, assisted the plotters in the Upper Volta military coup the year after that and been involved in hot spots on four continents in the decades following. He’d lost count of the interrogations, the disappearances, the deaths he’d been behind, but right now he was burning with a desire to add one to his tally.

  He looked down at the fork resting on the worn red Formica tabletop. It was no more than a centimetre from his right hand. He looked up at Orton’s long, narrow face, with its mocking, lead-coloured eyes. For a moment, he wondered whether he should just jam the tines of the fork up the hawk-like nose and into the brain. He breathed in, then out, and let the moment pass.

  “Lucky for you, no place is sacred. Given what Calder was doing, we felt it was prudent to follow his trail until it was completely cold. And you should be fucking pleased that I have your back. Because if this shit hits the fan, we will all have our asses thrown before a Congressional committee, and I for one am not going to go down without taking you with me.”

  Orton held his hands up in a placatory gesture. He smiled.

  “Baines, I’m sorry. You’re right, I did fuck up. But there’s no reason for the police there to think he was murdered. In fact, with your,” he paused, “ingenuity, I’m sure you could cook up some mise-en-scène that would satisfy them it was an accident.” He looked across the table at Christie, whose heavy brow had furrowed at the French phrase. “It means arranging the scenery to tell a story, Baines.”

  The muscles of Christie’s jaws bunched.

  “I know what it means, you fucking prick. I’m thinking. That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said since I got here. Leave it to me.” He stood. “Coffees’re on you.”

  8

  Office Chat

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  CHRISTIE entered his boss’s office with misgivings. Orton was his asset, and Orton had fucked up. That meant Christie had fucked up. Not badly. Not like Amman, when fifteen shoppers, including the wife of a powerful sheikh and US ally, had been reduced to their component parts by a car bomb. But badly enough to have Christie’s heart beating a little too fiercely for comfort in his barrel chest.

  The boss looked up from a report she was redacting, a four-mil Sharpie gripped between long, narrow fingers. Her hair: that was what everybody noticed about her first. Bible-black and arrow straight, a short, efficient cut that was all business. Then the mouth. Capable of signalling displeasure or approval with a range of twitches and pursings, emphasised by the scarlet lipstick. It was pursing now, then tightening into a thin line.

  “Baines,” she said. “Sit.”

  He obeyed, folding his large frame into the confines of the leather-and-chrome chair he, and other big men under her, felt she’d chosen on purpose to discomfort them. He watched her cap the Sharpie and place it beside the report on the otherwise pristine desktop before gently replacing the cover page. Tried to control his breathing.

  “I just came from meeting Orton,” he said, relieved that his voice at least was steady. “It’s salvageable.”

  “I very much hope so. We’ve invested too much in this operation for it to fail because your asset has an ego bigger than the defence budget.”

  The operation she was referring to bore the innocuous code name ROSS. It was the surname of the Indian-born British doctor – Ronald Ross – who discovered the role mosquitoes played in the transmission of malaria. Some in her division had argued for WARP – Weaponised Aerial-Release Pathogens – but she had vetoed that. “This is the CIA, Tom, not some fucking comic book,” she’d said with a cold smile, when her number two had first proposed it.

  Now, Christie knew that Martha Cruikshank, forty-two, and the third most powerful woman in the CIA, had a problem. The operation she had authorised, funded and personally guaranteed the success of to her boss had been compromised because its civilian partner had, apparently, lost his temper and shot one of his own employees. Orton had snatched Christie’s gun from him before turning it on Calder.

  “Did you ask him why he dumped the body over land?”

  Christie nodded.

  “Reckoned it was safer. Though—”

  “It wasn’t? Clearly. So now we have Texas State Troopers, the San Antonio Police Department and for all I know the Texas-fucking-Rangers crawling all over it.”

  What Christie found so frightening about this slim-built woman facing him across the desk was the absence of shouting. He’d worked under male managers and was used to tuning out the testosterone-fuelled bluster and noise-making they used as their default intimidation techniques. But Cruikshank just fixed you with those hard, appraising eyes and kept her voice low and even.

  “Not the Rangers. SAPD have enough resources of their own.”

  “Oh, thank you for that threat assessment, Baines. That makes me feel so much better about this monumental fuckup you’ve created. I want the SAPD investigation shut down. I don’t care who you have to threaten or what story you have to cook up. I’ll supply the paper. Now get out and get it done.”

  With Baines out of her office, Cruikshank picked up the phone. Five minutes after that, she was sitting facing her own senior manager, a career Agency operator now in his late fifties named Scott Fleming. Silver hair cut en brosse, eyes narrowed as if facing bright sunlight, Fleming smiled across the messy desk and rested his hands lightly on the topmost paper.

  “Martha. You wanted to see me. Must be urgent if you wouldn’t accept my plea,” he indicated the mounds of paperwork scattered across the desk, “of having one or two other matters to attend to.”

  “It’s the project, Scott. ROSS. I’m concerned it’s developed a problem.”

  His face hardened instantly, eyes and mouth compressing into slits.

  “What kind of a problem?”

  “The head of security for the defence contractor we’re working with got curious. Now he’s dead. There’s a police investigation.”

  Fleming frowned. She felt a hot squirming in her belly. Frowns from Fleming had the same effect as she knew her own quiet murmurs of disapproval had on Christie and her other staff members.

  “You know, Martha, when I authorised your little venture into ‘non-conventional, counter-terror measures,’ as I seem to recall you characterised ROSS, it was with the proviso that it would commence, remain and conclude under the radar. Not just of the outside world, but the Agency management structure. Two days from now, I’m attending the latest hearing of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The chairman is that ambitious prick John Donaldson. If he had even a fraction of an idea what you were engaged in, the blood would be flowing out the doors of the committee room and down the fucking corridor, out into the street, and on to the glorious Atlantic Ocean.”

  “Scott, I know this is sub-optimal for our goals, but—”

  “I beg your pardon,” Fleming said in a dangerously quiet voice. “Did you just say ‘sub-optimal’?”

  “I’m sorry, Scott. I just meant—”

  “Let me tell you what’s looking sub-optimal, Martha. Your whole, fucking, career. I told you this was to be one hundred percent deniable. Externally and internally. You have no more support. No recourse to internal grievance procedures. Nothing. If the shit hits the fan, you are on your own. I will deny you like Peter denied Christ. Not once, not twice, not three times. I will deny you as many times as it takes to cut you adrift. They’ll crucify you and I’ll stand at the foot of your cross and watch.”

  Martha Cruikshank hadn’t risen to her current position by rolling over and exposing her throat when one of the big dogs threatened her.

  “You didn't have a problem with
it when you thought I could bring you a method of eradicating terrorists a whole generation at a time, Scott. Not the way I remember it. You seemed pretty keen to stand in front of the media and claim credit.”

  Fleming smiled, and the expression worried her more than the frown he’d just bestowed on her.

  “That was when you appeared to grasp the concept of secrecy. From what I hear, your asset or someone close to him dropped the snooper into the middle of the desert. From a fucking plane!”

  “It was a mistake. We’re rectifying it.”

  “You’d better. You’re behind an air gap on this one, Martha. No more resources, no more wiggle room. If anything leaks out of your team, I’ll disavow every last one of you. As far as the Agency’s concerned, let alone the outside world, you will cease to exist.”

  Cruikshank left Fleming’s office shaking. Not with fear. With rage. Baines Christie and his absurdly self-confident asset were problems she could do without. She went to find Christie, who was standing by a water cooler chatting to a couple of agents from another team. She signalled him with her eyes that he should make for the stairwell. He downed the cone of water he was holding in his meaty fist, screwed it into a pellet and tossed it with pinpoint accuracy into a waste bin.

  In the concrete stairwell, halfway between two floors, Cruikshank stopped.

  “We need to contain any and all fallout from Calder’s death and—”

  “I know. You said. I’m going to go find whoever’s heading the SAPD investigation.”

  She looked steadily at Christie for a second or two.

  “Please don’t interrupt me again, Baines. And—” she paused, “—that includes the widow. I don’t want her hiring a private investigator or writing to her congressman demanding answers. OK?”

  He nodded. She turned on her heel and marched back to the fire door and pushed through, leaving Christie to ponder his new orders.

  9

  Clark Orton, Shadow

  DURING a rare night together, at the height of the Korean War, Andrew Orton and his wife Suzanne conceived the boy who, though they didn’t – couldn’t – know at the time, was to be their only child. Nine months and two weeks later, Suzanne Orton was induced at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, DC, and delivered of a strapping baby boy who tipped the scales at ten pounds and thirteen ounces. The date was August 29, 1951.

  His father was English, on loan to the CIA from the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, as it was popularly known. His mother, born in Wisconsin to farming folk, was a full-time homemaker. Growing up, Clark was a studious child. Thanks in part to his father’s connections, but mainly his own prodigious intellect, Clark secured a place at Princeton in 1969. During vacations, he and his father had spent many hours at the family’s lakeside cabin discussing geopolitics, and especially the rise of communism. The father had discerned in the son some of the same fervour he himself felt about “the red menace,” though as a Brit he tended to avoid such flag-waving language in favour of more nuanced references to “our leftist friends.”

  In Clark’s final term at Princeton, an attractive, if severe, woman dressed in a dark-blue suit had taken his arm as he exited a lecture on the psychology of influence and asked if she might buy him a coffee. When they were sitting together in the cafeteria, she smiled at him as she blew on the surface of her coffee.

  “I’m a friend of your father’s, Clark. My name’s Eileen. How are your studies going?”

  He shrugged. “OK, I suppose. You mind telling me why a woman dressed like you would want to talk to a student like me?”

  “Straight to the point, I like that,” she said, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear. “You know what he does for a living?”

  “Yeah. Government work.”

  She nodded, then smiled again. “There’s no need to be coy. He works for the CIA. I do, too. And he thinks you might be a good fit with the Agency’s ideas and ways of working. I’m here to find out a little more about you. See if your father’s right.”

  “What do you want to know?” he asked.

  “Well, for a start, tell me, do you consider yourself a patriot?”

  “Of course.”

  “How strong a patriot? Flag outside the house kind of a patriot?” She waggled her head from side to side so that her blonde hair swayed like curtains before a breeze. “Despair at your fellow students rioting against perfectly legitimate military action in Southeast Asia kind of a patriot? Or a willing to do what it takes kind of patriot?”

  “If those are the three choices, then I’m a willing to do what it takes kind.”

  A personal letter arrived for Clark a week later. It was signed Eileen, though Clark was sufficiently aware of the CIA’s working methods to wonder whether Eileen herself had had anything to do with it. The writer, whoever it was, suggested he should attend his local Army recruiting centre and enlist. He would avoid a combat role, the writer assured him of that. Greater things lay ahead.

  In truth, Clark had been seriously considering enlisting anyway, as an infantryman. Yes, he was a patriot. But he was something else, too.

  For most of his adolescence, he had been aware of a growing feeling within his breast that he would be good at killing. He had limited himself to game. But he wrote lurid stories in which the protagonist, writing in the first person, was a cold, calculating killer. “I pulled the trigger.” “I stabbed him.” “My hands went around her neck.” He kept the stapled pages locked away in a trunk beneath his bed.

  The “something else” had led him to undertake solo hunting trips during the long summer vacations from university. And to a certain class of prostitute in Trenton, New Brunswick and other towns near Princeton. He hadn’t killed the hookers. But he had asked them to allow him to role-play certain scenarios in which the climax was their (feigned) death.

  Vietnam had appeared to offer the perfect opportunity to let the “something else” out into the open. So Clark was mildly disappointed by the promise that he would avoid the fighting.

  On enlisting, as promised, he was assigned to Army Intelligence. A short period of basic training followed. But then, when his barracks mates were shipping out to Vietnam, he was despatched to Langley for further training. Specialist training.

  Three months after that, Clark Orton found himself in a nine-foot-square room in an American-owned building in Saigon. He was nineteen, the average age of all American troops in Vietnam. He was sweating, despite the fan placed in a corner of the dimly lit space, watching through a one-way mirror as two senior operatives in the room beyond interrogated a mid-ranking officer in the North Vietnamese Army. Clark’s role, as explained to him by the steel-grey-haired agent who’d collected him in an air-conditioned Cadillac from the airport, was simple. “Watch and learn, son.”

  On the third day, just after lunch, Clark was back at his post, watching and learning, as the two CIA men took turns to harangue the NVA officer. The man’s green shirt was darkened by water, which still streamed from his hair. Then, at four-thirty-three, the two operatives glanced at each other, then down at the swollen face of their captive, nodded and left the room, signalling for the interpreter to follow them out.

  The door to Clark’s room opened and the two agents stepped into the humid cube.

  “We’re done with him, Orton,” the steel-grey-haired man said. “You’ve done your watching. Now it’s time to do your learning. Here.” He flipped his jacket back and pulled a pistol from a holster on his belt, a chunky Colt 1911. “Go in there and put him out of his misery.”

  As Clark took the proffered gun, he noticed the looks on both men’s faces. Half-amused, half-watchful, alert to any failings on his part. They needn’t have worried. It was the reason he’d come to this godforsaken country in the first place. He checked the pistol. Grey-haired man wasn’t taking any chances. The hammer was back and the safety was on. Locked and cocked. He walked through the open door and turned right before entering the interrogation room, thumbing the safety off as he went. />
  The NVA man sat slumped in the chair, head on his chest. He had fainted, or was doing a good impression. Clark slapped him, none too gently on the left cheek. He jerked his head up and his eyes widened when he saw this youth looming over him and holding a pistol.

  Clark looked at the mirror, smiled, then returned his gaze to the NVA officer. Feeling no need for talk, he simply pointed the gun at the man’s forehead and pulled the trigger, sending a .45 calibre round into his skull and painting the wall behind with a spray of blood and brain matter. From that moment on, his career was assured. After Vietnam, and side trips to Laos and Cambodia, he moved on to pastures new in Latin America, South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

  It was in the Second Gulf War that Clark Orton spotted the opportunity that was to truly transform his fortunes. By then, feeling his age and wanting to make some serious money, he had resigned from the CIA and set up one of the first private defence contracting firms. Clark Orton Associates had been hired to assist in a programme of extraordinary rendition. The firm’s mordant internal jargon was “KAT” – kidnapping and torture.

  Clark supervised the operation personally. He enjoyed “getting my hands dirty” as he joked to the CIA executive who handed him the signed contract along with a suitcase of untraceable US dollars for use in the theatre of war.

  It was after a gruelling session with an Al Qaeda leader that Clark had the insight that would make him a very wealthy man. That evening he was lying on his bed in his hotel room in the centre of Doha, sipping single malt from a heavy, cut-glass tumbler. Through headphones connected to the hi-fi system generously provided by his Qatari hosts, he was listening to an album of songs performed live by the Manhattan-born satirist, Tom Lehrer. Introducing one song about a doctor, Lehrer commented of the medic that he “specialised in diseases of the rich.”