Allender stared at him for a moment. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”
“Not one pound, unfortunately,” McGill replied.
“But I would have assumed that that program’s long dead.”
“And that’s what I thought, too.”
Allender thought for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s review the bidding: Since that program was supposedly terminated when I left, it seems to me that you’ve got two problems. First, what happened to Hank, and, second, how did a cauterized program come back to life without your knowledge, O Great DDO?”
McGill sighed as he leaned back in his chair. He took off his glasses and began to rub his eyes. Allender remembered this routine, too, and could almost predict the speech that McGill was about to crank up. Sometimes in the course of human events …
“Spare me,” he said, before McGill could get up a head of steam. “I’ll reluctantly lend a hand, but I’ll want a signed contract. From the director. Clearances as necessary, and, of course I must know the identity of the swan.”
“I can get you all the paper cover you need,” McGill said. “Clearances, access, pay, and allowances, but not the operative who was going to initiate the swan.”
“Carson,” Allender began, but McGill raised his hand.
“We don’t know who he or she is,” he said, quietly.
Allender stared. “Wow,” he said, finally.
“Yeah,” McGill said. “Wow.”
“How is this possible?” Allender asked. “You were still DDO when Hank cranked this up, correct?”
McGill flushed. “Yes, I was. Still am, actually. Double-hatted.”
“Because when you and I ran a swan, I had a boatload of support from your ops people. Controller Smith, central-casting prop managers, a top-tier team, and even a pet hotel. You’re telling me Hank got all that without your hearing about it?”
“Don’t rub it in, Preston,” McGill said. “But, apparently, yes to all of the above.”
“Damn!” Allender said. For a moment he even sympathized with the portly DDO. Then reason returned. “Well,” he said. “That means someone in your organization went around you. Way around you. That’s where you need to start, not with the Bureau. And not with me, either.”
“Trust me, Preston, I’m well ahead of you there.”
“Then what the hell do you want me to do?”
“Frustrate the goddamned FBI, of course. Lead them on every kind of wild-goose chase you can imagine. You’re a shrink—you can do that. Baffle them with bullshit. Lay down hints of dark deeds and sinister plots, and then seduce them into chasing down every fucking one of them. They’re a bunch of robots, for Chrissakes. Give ’em the dragon-eyes treatment. Do whatever it takes to give us time to figure out what the fuck Hank Wallace was up to.”
Allender didn’t know what to say that could get him out of this one. McGill’s vulgar language indicated how upset he was. “And you have no ideas?” he asked.
“One,” McGill admitted. “And, truth in lending, it’s not my idea. It’s the director’s.”
“I’m all ears,” Allender said.
“It’s something to do with Martine Greer.”
Allender closed his eyes. Holy shit, he thought. We talked about this a long time ago. Carson, you idiot. Run, he thought. Run. Now.
McGill read his thoughts. “Full active-duty pay,” he said. “The Bureau will treat you as an SES-2; you know how rank-conscious they are. You will report to me and me alone. I’ll assign a security detail and a car.”
“No.”
“Please, Preston. I know we can’t really make you do this, but you offer some special—skills that I think this problem will need. And besides, I think somebody killed Hank. We have to know who that somebody was, but we have to find out our way.”
Allender took off his glasses and treated McGill to as cold a look as he could manage. McGill was clearly uncomfortable with that look, but this morning he was being terribly brave. “That somebody probably speaks Mandarin,” Allender said.
“Yes,” McGill said. “And so do you. Please?”
Allender felt a black weight descending onto his shoulders. “Carson,” he said. “They’re not dopes over there in the Hoover Building. They’ll recognize a stall when they see one.”
“Our feeling is that they’ll be so busy trying to figure you out that they won’t recognize a stall.”
“Who’s working it for the Agency?”
“If you don’t know, you can’t tell,” McGill said. “It’s not that we don’t trust you—just standard compartmentalization. The important thing is that our people will know who you are and why you’re working with the Bureau.”
“Is there an autopsy report?”
“Yes, and the Bureau has a copy.”
“Who did the autopsy?”
“The Borgias,” McGill replied, obviously getting tired of answering questions. Allender wondered when McGill would recognize that he was being stalled.
“The Bureau’s lab is the best there is, when they’re not cooking the books. Why the Borgias?”
“The Borgias” was the in-house nickname for the Agency’s poison laboratory, which was part of the Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Weapons Department. “Because the autopsy revealed no apparent cause of death,” McGill said.
“Couldn’t he have just—died? He’s what—sixty-something? Smokes? Drank like a fish, from what I was told.”
“All of those vices—booze, tobacco, old age, sexual perversion—leave traces. A heart attack leaves traces. A stroke leaves traces. What the hell, Preston: You’re a doctor—there were no fucking traces!”
“You still have the remains?”
“No,” McGill said. “He was a lifetime bachelor, like you, no surviving relatives, so we had the remains cremated after the examination. We did save tissue samples, of course, in case someone comes up with a viable theory.”
“What if the Bureau comes up with a viable theory?”
“Report it.”
“What if I come up with a viable theory?”
“Report it, but only to me. But theories aren’t your brief, Preston. The big stall. That’s your brief.”
“This is beginning to sound as if you know someone in the Agency had a hand in this little whodunit.”
McGill got up, his coffee unfinished. “Now you’re catching on, Preston.” He looked at his watch. “I must go,” he said. “Logistics to follow. I’ve told the Hooverites to expect you tomorrow at ten o’clock.”
“Everyone in the Hoover Building is at his desk and urgently leaning forward by seven thirty in the morning,” Allender said.
“Set the precedent on the first day, Preston,” McGill advised. “You’re a senior liaison officer from another agency, not a Buroid temp. If they’re all in at seven thirty, then they should be well prepared to brief you by the time you arrive. At ten. It’s kinda like what old wives tell new wives: Don’t do anything in the first week of marriage that you don’t want to do for the rest of your married life.”
* * *
The next morning, Allender surveyed his new office and wondered who’d been kicked out of it on short notice. He’d been delivered to the Hoover Building in an Agency car and met at the main entrance by an athletic-looking young man with a shaved head and a friendly greeting. His building passes were ready except for a picture. The ID tech asked him to remove his glasses, and Allender obliged. After a moment the tech said he could go ahead and put them back on. Then he took the picture. Once they were on the third floor, the agent had shown him where the bathrooms and the elevators were and warned him that the elevators were unreliable and the bathrooms something of an embarrassment. He then told him that Supervisory Special Agent Rebecca Lansing would be down shortly to meet him and give him an in-brief.
There was neither a computer nor a secure telephone in the office, but McGill had promised him both would be supplied from the Agency, the Bureau’s comms equipment being notoriously antiquated. The office was spacious e
nough but shabby. In fact the whole building was shabby, victim of ten years of budgetary neglect while the General Services Administration tried to decide where to build a new headquarters. The GSA had been getting lots of help and advice from the competing congressional delegations of Maryland and Virginia, who were desperate to acquire the eleven thousand federal taxpayers who staffed Bureau headquarters.
“Doctor Allender?” a voice said from behind him. He turned to find an attractive if somewhat stern-looking woman standing in the office doorway. She was in her late thirties, with black hair, an enticing figure modestly dressed in a dark pantsuit, and lovely blue-green eyes. “I’m Rebecca Lansing. I’m running the Wallace case.”
She offered a handshake and he took it, which was not his usual custom at all. She indicated that he should sit at the desk and then she took one of the two armchairs parked in front of the desk. She pulled out a gold-plated NRA bullet pen and a notebook.
“Before I start filling you in, can you tell me what your area was at the Agency?”
He nodded. “I was in the training business,” he replied. “I trained our interrogators and what you would call our profilers. I also conducted annual interviews with management staff to assess their emotional and intellectual capacity to continue in their present positions.”
“May I ask what qualified you to do those things?” For a brief moment he started to take offense to that question, but then realized she hadn’t asked it in any sort of “what makes you so special” manner.
“I’m a psychiatrist, for one,” he replied. “I also have some small ability to seize control of or manipulate an individual’s emotions once I have him or her under suitable duress.”
“Are you a mind reader, then?” she asked with a completely straight face, as if mind readers were a common occurrence.
“Most of the time I am not,” he said.
“Most of the time.”
He smiled but did not reply.
“Oka-a-y,” she said. “Did Mister McGill tell you what’s happened?”
“Only that someone found the Agency’s deputy director, Hank Wallace, dead in his study, and that there’s been no apparent cause of death or manner of death determination, either by the Agency or by the Bureau’s review of the autopsy. That’s about it.”
“Are you familiar with homicide investigations?”
“No,” he said. “Nor was I aware that the Bureau did homicide investigations.”
She nodded. “Normally we don’t. We assist local police authorities, when asked, or if we think the incident bears on something bigger. And I guess that’s my next question for you: Is there something bigger going on here? Something that would provoke the chairwoman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to inject the Bureau into what looks an awful lot like an Agency goat-grab?”
He smiled. “It’s possible, Special Agent—is that the proper form of address, by the way?”
“Langley told us that they brought you back on active service as an SES-2. That means I may call you ’sir,’ and you can call me anything you’d like. Rebecca, if you wish, Supervisory Special Agent Lansing if you must.”
“Okay, Rebecca,” he said. “I’ve been retired for just over a year. Once someone like me leaves the Great Game we just go, and that’s that, as it should be. So I’m not sure what’s behind Martine Greer’s request, either from an operational or a bureaucratic perspective. It could just be devilment. According to McGill, I’m here because you asked for a senior liaison officer.”
At that moment a young man arrived with Allender’s completed building pass and a set of FBI credentials, minus the golden badge.
“It’s just that we didn’t expect a senior executive service officer,” she said, once the young man left. “I was thinking more like assistant division head. Someone who knows who’s who in the zoo, but not a boss.”
He studied her for a moment. “Did you volunteer,” he asked, “to head up this task force, assuming that’s what it’s called?”
“No,” she said. “I was assigned by the FBI director’s office to run it.”
“And could that possibly have been because every other senior agent within shouting distance had already made it to high cover?”
She smiled. “It’s possible,” she replied, echoing his own answer.
“May have been a similar situation over at Langley,” he said. “So, when everybody else has managed to slip the trap, Langley resorted to getting a retiree, a senior one. He’s got nothing to lose, careerwise. Even better, he’ll be your asset and not the Agency’s because no one over there in Langley wants to touch this one.”
She nodded but didn’t say anything.
“Why’d you want another liaison officer, anyway?” he asked. “There’s already a liaison office here for that, isn’t there?”
“Actually,” she said. “Truth-in-lending time. I’m really with the Agency.”
“Sure you are.”
“Yes, I am. I’m a special projects officer in Director Hingham’s office. I am the unlisted, if you will, Agency liaison officer at the Bureau headquarters. There’s another person in the Hoover Building who is the ‘public’ CIA liaison officer, but I work out of the FBI deputy director’s office, where I do compartmented tasking, like this little cluster. Before that I was out in LA, doing pretty much the same thing with the LA field office, except there I was out in the open. The Bureau has these intel fusion centers in their bigger field offices. I led a team of three operators on their antiterror task force.”
“My, my,” Allender said. “And before that?”
“One low-level posting overseas in the CS.”
“And then, two exchange assignments with the Bureau?”
“The Agency sometimes doesn’t know what to do with their female officers, especially one tied to Hingham. I think there’s a bit of old-guard mistrust involved. You know, spies are supposed to be men, not women.”
“As everyone well knows,” he said.
She smiled. “Yeah, but. It suits me, though. Working at Langley was getting boring. Everybody my age was much more focused on getting ahead than getting the bad guys. I like working with the G-men—and women. They’re serious about the job at hand. Anyway, Director Hingham wanted this one compartmentalized from regular channels, so I was directed to ‘volunteer,’ to the sound of much applause over here, I must admit. Besides, if Wallace’s death was a hit, that would be a really big deal and the Bureau would have an interest.”
“Yes, it would,” Allender said, remembering McGill’s use of that same term. “So: What do you want from me?”
“Senior-level access. I can do the worker-bee-level stuff. Keep us from spinning our wheels.”
“I can certainly do that,” he said. “But you do realize the Agency’s got a team working this incident, too, right? Who would probably be delighted if you spun your J. Edgar wheels right off?”
She cocked her head to one side and just looked at him for a moment. “So,” she said, but then apparently changed her mind about what she’d been about to say. She asked a question instead: “Is it true you were called Dragon Eyes when you were still serving?”
“Never to my face, Rebecca,” he replied, softly. “So when do I get to meet the rest of the team?”
SIXTEEN
At the end of his first day among the First Team, Allender went out the front entrance to find a black Expedition waiting for him. He got into the backseat only to discover that Carson McGill was sitting in the right front seat.
“Honey, I’m home,” Allender announced, and McGill snorted. He told the driver to drive down to the Mall. When they neared the World War II memorial, the car stopped. They got out and went for a walk.
“What do they know?” he asked.
“Not much,” Allender said. “They never saw the scene, the body, or a CSI report, and if I’m not mistaken, they don’t have a clue as to what to do next.”
“Good,” McGill said. “I was hoping that’s what you’d fi
nd.”
“There is the slightest possibility that they know they’re being fucked with.”
“Of course they do,” McGill said. “That’s why I’m going to provide you with a list of names. These are supposedly people who’ve gotten across the breakers with Wallace over the years. Some people he fired, some others who wanted his job but were outmaneuvered, two women who accused him of sexual harassment, and a guy who claimed Wallace was working for another intelligence service. Some are still active, some retired. The guy who accused him of being a spy is ‘missing.’”
“Any merit to any of those accusations?”
“The women, possibly. Hank was a hands-on kinda guy when it came to pretty women. Grew out of it once he became Deppity Dawg, or so I was told.”
“And you want me to hand this list over to the Bureau team?”
“Yup,” McGill said. “Give them some bones to gnash. They’re good at investigating people, and it fits: who else would have a motive, if it was a homicide.”
“You think it was a homicide?”
McGill shrugged. “Our lab people say that the absence of any evidence of what might have killed him suggests that something seriously occult did the deed. They’re talking to the NIH as we speak.”
“The Bureau team really wishes you hadn’t cremated the remains.”
“We kept tissue samples, as I told you. We’ll share if they wish.”
“I think they do wish, but they’ve not been able to find out how to get some samples.”
“Tell them to talk to their CIA liaison officer,” McGill said, as the driver, responding to some signal Allender hadn’t seen, drew alongside the curb. “Metro’s right up there,” McGill said, as he got back into the Expedition. “Your comms gear will be in place at home and in your FBI office by midnight.”
As the big black vehicle pulled out into traffic, Allender realized McGill hadn’t given him any list. The nearest Metro station was Smithsonian, about a half mile away. He started walking, oblivious to the thinning crowds of tourists admiring all the monuments, but then he found himself having to step aside for an organized tour group of chattering Chinese tourists, who were dutifully following their tour leader down toward the Lincoln Memorial. The tour leader had a bright red flag raised over her head to ensure that none of her charges went astray. They were mostly middle-aged men and women and not the usual giggling crowd of uniformed foreign students one encountered on the Mall.
Red Swan Page 14
