HUNTER

by Bidinotto, Robert

  “Would you mind my asking who these people are? I’m sure he would want to know.”

  “Well, I’m not at liberty to reveal any names at the moment. However, I’m certain that their feelings will be conveyed back to him in due course.”

  Frankfurt entered the room at that moment, catching his eye with a smile and nod. He sat opposite Grayson.

  “Mr. Grayson was just telling me that his gift is largely in response to your work, Carl.”

  Frankfurt beamed. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Doctor, words are inadequate to encompass the reach of your deeds,” Grayson said.

  MacLean glanced down at Grayson’s business card, which he’d placed on the table at his fingertips. “I see you’re headquartered in Los Angeles.”

  “It is just a place to hang my hat. My financial-services consultations take me all over the country. One of my regrets is about Christmas this year. I have heard about your gala annual holiday party, and I would have loved to attend,” he said. Then grinned. “Assuming that my donation would have been sufficient to purchase a ticket.”

  MacLean and Frankfurt laughed with him. He really liked this man. More than a bit stuffy, but obviously a kind soul. You found so few like him in the business world these days.

  MacLean said, “That’s too bad. Our trustees will be attending, and I have no doubt they would have wanted to meet you.”

  “Yes, it is regrettable,” he said. Then his face brightened. “However, perhaps I might contribute a little something to your celebration?”

  MacLean exchanged glances with Frankfurt, whose face reflected his astonishment. “Oh, but Mr. Grayson, you’ve already been more than generous!”

  The man leaned forward, his eyes intense and eager. “No, really. If you would please permit me—perhaps introduce me to your event planners—I would love the opportunity to participate. I have been involved in planning a number of high-profile, even theatrical, events. I am certain that I could add some creative touches to your celebration, as well. Since I will not be able to be in the room with you in person, it would be my pleasure to join you in spirit.”

  MacLean looked again at Frankfurt. “What do you think, Carl?”

  “I could him put him in touch with the people over at the hotel.”

  “That would be splendid,” Grayson said, smiling broadly. “I have about another free hour today—assuming that your schedule permits, Dr. Frankfurt.”

  “Oh, of course. I’d be delighted.”

  MacLean rose from his seat. “Mr. Grayson, I’m just flabbergasted. In all my years of charity work, I’ve never had an encounter quite like this one—so unexpected, and so delightful. I can’t begin to thank you enough. I hope to see much more of you.”

  Grayson shook hands with him. “Oh, you will, sir. And again, your gratitude is quite unnecessary. If you will forgive me a familiar platitude, just think of this as my way of ‘giving back.’”

  THIRTY-ONE

  CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  Friday, December 19, 1:01 p.m.

  She rapped on the door.

  “It’s unlocked.”

  She entered Garrett’s office. He stood near the coffee table and club chairs with an elderly, distinguished-looking gentleman in gray tweed. Both men smiled as she approached.

  “Annie Woods, I’d like you to meet my old friend, Professor Donald Kessler of Princeton University.”

  “Professor emeritus, actually; my teaching days are long past.”

  She smiled and shook hands with him. He was in his seventies and blade-thin. But he still had a full head of wavy white hair and a matching goatee. She thought, amused, that he could do ads for a fried chicken chain.

  Garrett gestured for them to sit. Annie poured some coffee from the waiting pot while he began.

  “Don taught undergrad Politics at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School for Public Policy. Also, grad courses in International Studies, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “You’re not,” Kessler replied.

  “But years before that, and just after he finished his doctorate, he spent about seven years with us as a case officer. Damned good one, I might add.”

  “Until I met the girl of my dreams,” the old man said.

  Garrett smiled at him gently. “She sure was something, Don.”

  “She was.” The soft way he said it told her the rest of the story.

  “Anyway, after Don left the Agency and started teaching at Princeton, we kept him on the payroll as an outside consultant. Among his little assignments over the years was to spot talent for us.”

  Kessler turned to her. “In the old days, the Company recruited many officers straight from the Ivy League. I was one of those recruits, and later, one of the recruiters.”

  “Which brings us to why I called you in,” Garrett said. “Annie, I was right. I’ve been blind. I had it all in my head, all along. But it didn’t come together for me until Don came by to visit. He asked what I was working on, and no sooner did I begin to tell him, than it hit me.”

  She leaned forward. “What?”

  “Remember our conversation a few months ago about our assumptions? About how one or more of them had to be wrong?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, our very first assumption was wrong. Motive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We knew the Russians would want to stop Muller from spilling his guts about their operations. That’s motive. So when he was taken out, we followed a chain of very reasonable inferences. Because Muller was killed at a top-secret safe house, we figured somebody had to tip the sniper about the location. And that implied a source on the inside—another Agency mole. Yet, we were baffled because the crime-scene evidence didn’t suggest a Russian sniper, but an American.”

  “Right,” she said. “So we deduced that our Agency mole must have enlisted an Agency sniper. And then we went on a wild goose chase looking for somebody in SAD or OS who might have done it.”

  “Just as my mole-hunt proved to be a wild goose chase. Because we never double-checked our initial premise. Motive, Annie. We, the FBI, everybody—we all simply assumed that the Russians were the only people who might want James Muller dead.”

  The thought startled her. “Well, who else, then?”

  He reached for a small manila envelope lying on the coffee table and handed it to her.

  “Annie Woods—meet Matt Malone.”

  *

  She opened the flap and withdrew a 5 x 7 photo. It showed a dark-haired, bearded man in rough clothing. He sat on a flat-topped boulder in a harsh, stony landscape with jagged mountains in the background. Across his lap lay what looked to be an AK-47. She couldn’t make out much of his face: The grainy shot had been taken at a distance, and he was in profile, looking at something off-camera. If she hadn’t been told his name, she would have guessed that he was an Afghan or Paki tribesman.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “He’s one of ours.”

  “He was one of ours. The best damned officer I ever ran.”

  “The best damned officer I ever recruited,” added Kessler.

  Garrett got up, rolled his shoulders, then headed for his desk drawer. He came back with two packs of Luckies and his electronic smoke filter.

  “Grant, you’re incorrigible,” Kessler said.

  “Screw you.” He clicked a button, got the gadget humming.

  She asked, “So what can you tell me about this man?”

  Kessler took a sip of black coffee, put down the cup. Spread his pale, bony hands on the thighs of his trousers, then closed his eyes, remembering.

  “Matthew Everett Malone. Born 5 June 1969 in Pittsburgh. An only child. His father, Michael Henry Malone. A hugely successful building contractor whose business took off in the 1950s. That was the initial phase of Pittsburgh’s ‘Renaissance’ redevelopment. Helen Cassini, Matthew’s mother by Malone’s second marriage, was with a Pittsburgh newspaper. She met Malone while on assignment. They married and she l
eft the paper when she became pregnant with Matthew.”

  He paused for another sip. “Matthew idolized his father. He described Mike as a man’s man with a strict code of honor and a strong drive to achieve. Clearly, he was a brilliant entrepreneur. Before he died, Malone Commercial Development had branches in ten states, and the family fortune was estimated at over a half-billion dollars.”

  Garrett whistled. “I didn’t know it was that much.”

  “Oh yes. The Malones lived in an upscale Pittsburgh suburb, Fox Chapel. Matthew didn’t want for material things or opportunities, including foreign travel and a great private school. And thanks to his mother, there were plenty of books in the house to pique the curiosity of a little boy with a restless, inquisitive mind. He told me that current events and politics were frequent topics around the dinner table.”

  Kessler looked off into space. “Well, Matthew could have turned out to be just another spoiled rich kid. But instead he grew into a well-educated, athletic young man with unusual poise and self-confidence. And he had a charming, dry sense of humor, too.”

  “I envy his girlfriends,” she said, interrupting his reverie. “He must have been the most popular guy in school.”

  Kessler shook his head. “You would think so. But actually, he was a loner. Not antisocial, just not really very social, if you get what I mean. Serious, solitary, self-sufficient. He told me once that he had been so captivated by the world of ideas that he felt little kinship with his more conventional peers.” He smiled. “I could relate to that. Perhaps that’s why we hit it off when we met, and why he eventually opened up to me.”

  Garrett got up and began to pace near the windows as Kessler continued.

  “He might have become a scholar. But his father wanted to temper his cerebral preoccupations with involvement in the real world. So, in addition to getting his son’s hands dirty on his construction sites, Mike insisted that he take up at least one competitive sport each school year. Predictably, he avoided team sports and chose the individual ones: swimming, gymnastics, martial arts. He told me he preferred to be the only person responsible for his success or failure.”

  “How did you get to know him so well?”

  “We met by sheer serendipity, Annie. I was into martial arts, too, and we had both signed up for a hapkido class not long after he arrived as a freshman. That was in ’87. Well, after one sparring session, I found that we shared many philosophical views, and he was extraordinarily articulate about his. I learned that he was majoring in Politics, with a focus in political theory, and it turned out that he’d be taking a lot of my classes.

  “I liked him immediately, so I invited him to a party at our home for some grad students. These were some of the smartest young intellectuals at Princeton—which means some of the smartest in America. Anyway, some hot political argument started up, as they often did among those kids. But even though he was about six years younger than most of them, he held his own. Let me tell you, I was impressed. So much so that I arranged to become his faculty advisor. Over time, we became friends, and I continued to invite him to our home. Jill became quite fond of him, too.”

  He paused, just an instant. The loss seemed fresh. “Anyway, Princeton is quite tough on Politics undergrads. But his grades were exceptional, and somehow, despite his course load, he still managed to keep up competitive swimming and martial arts. He even did some reporting and columns for the campus paper.”

  She picked up and studied his photo again. She tried to reconcile what she was hearing with the bearded, rough-looking thug cradling the rifle.

  “When he graduated in 1990,” Kessler went on, “I encouraged him to pursue a Master’s in international affairs and also to take some Middle Eastern languages. I told him that the Middle East was where the important action in the world would be centered for the foreseeable future. He agreed and jumped right in. He became my preceptor—I’m sorry, that’s Princetonese for ‘teaching assistant’—and he enrolled in the local Berlitz courses in Farsi and Arabic. That’s when I discovered another remarkable thing about him: Matthew had an incredible facility for languages.”

  “You were grooming him.”

  He held her eyes. “And I make no apologies for it. Matthew was highly patriotic, and he had all the talents and aptitudes that would make him a great case officer.”

  “So, how did you make the pitch?”

  “Before I could, there was an interruption. In 1992, Mike Malone was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It hit Matthew hard. He took off the spring semester—which would have been his last—to care for his dying father and help his mother cope. Mike died that summer, and Matthew returned to complete his last semester in the fall.”

  “Which brings us up to the first World Trade Center bombing.”

  He pointed a thin finger at her and smiled. “Good girl. February 26, 1993. Yes, that was the turning point. I immediately took a month’s leave to do some consulting here at Langley and over at the Pentagon.”

  Garrett approached, cigarette in hand. “After that bombing, Congress leaned hard on us to put more officers in the field and try to recruit agents inside the terrorist networks. That’s when I finally got the green light to ramp up our own recruiting here in Ops. So, when Don showed up here in my office and started raving about this potential NOC superstar—” He spread his hands.

  “NOC?” It surprised her. She knew most CIA case officer candidates were trained for eventual “official cover” status in a foreign embassy, usually with a transparently fake job title. They had the protection of official diplomatic status. A “non-official cover” officer, however, was a different breed. NOCs lived under deep cover, out in the cold, operating largely on their own and without diplomatic immunity. Typically, they held a cover job with a private company. “How did you peg him as a NOC so early?”

  “Think about it, Annie,” Garrett said, ticking off the points on his fingers. “Loner—completely self-reliant and utterly self-confident. Super smart. Fluent in the right languages. Skilled in martial arts. Experienced with firearms. Patriotic. Self-disciplined. Highly motivated. Hell, I never thought twice about putting him into the usual training track down on the Farm. I knew that after a couple years, he’d wind up making paper airplanes behind some desk in Madrid. Just another total waste of talent.”

  He took a puff, blew a stream of smoke before continuing. “And we just couldn’t afford that. Not anymore. Not with the terrorist threat spinning out of control. I needed people who could be trained to operate without anybody holding their hands. People who would be willing and able to go out and mix it up with the hajis.”

  She had to smile. Nobody ever accused Garrett of being Politically Correct. “So you signed off on it.”

  “And sent Don right back home to make the pitch.”

  Kessler picked up the tale again. “I invited Matthew to discuss something over drinks down in D-Bar—that’s a watering hole in a basement at the Grad College. After some small talk, I brought up the World Trade Center bombing. The implications. Where it was all headed. I remember saying, ‘The next time will be much worse.’ My God, I had no idea, then.... Well, Matthew agreed with me. He was passionately opposed to radical Islam and keenly understood the dangers that it poses to the West.”

  “So over beers, you pitched him.”

  “I did. I told him my history with the Company; that one of my jobs was to find qualified candidates to help fight the war against violent Islamic fundamentalists; that I thought he had an extraordinary set of abilities to bring to the defense of America.”

  “I bet he was floored.”

  “He’s pretty reserved about showing his feelings. But let’s say that it was not at all what he had planned to be doing with his life. Over the next hour, I explained—as honestly and graphically as I could—the sort of contributions he might make. And the personal costs. He listened without saying a word, looking straight into my eyes the whole time. When I finished, I told him to sleep on it, and I called the waitress o
ver for the bill.

  “I’ll never forget the expression that came over his face. It had been tight, completely intense. All of a sudden, it relaxed. He looked slowly around the room, at things on the walls, at his fellow students. Then he picked up his mug of beer, drained it, and set it back down on the table, very deliberately. He held my eyes, stuck out his hand, and said: ‘I don’t have to sleep on it, Don. I’m in.’”

  She glanced again at the photo, now lying on the coffee table. “As you say, an extraordinary young man. And now—he’s gone?”

  “But not forgotten. His subsequent career in the Agency—if we could tell it—would be the stuff of legends.”