by Gayle Lynds
Tice tossed the wallet deep into the trees and pocketed everything else. With the corpse unable to tell him more, he piled brush and leaves over it. As he worked, he tried to figure out how he had been found. No one knew about this place, and he was damn certain no one had followed him.
He finished hiding the body then patted himself down, looking for a tracker. Nothing. He scooped up the janitor’s SIG Sauer. As he stripped off his shirt, he jogged back around the boulder to his metal lockbox, wet the shirt on dewy grass, and used it to clean himself. Waiting in the box was his holster and the rest of his “pocket litter”—cash, IDs, business cards, credit cards—plus navy trousers and a tan-colored shirt. He strapped the holster under his arm, slid in the SIG Sauer then dressed in the new clothes. The shirt pulled across his chest, reflecting his larger muscles, a result of working out at the penitentiary.
Moving quickly, he stuffed the IDs and other tradecraft items into his pockets and locked his bloodied prison clothes inside the box. Browning in one hand, box in the other, he doubled back to the road and hid inside the treeline. The sunny tableau was as he had left it: His car was still parked near the Civil War memorial. The blue jay was still dining on its mouse. Two cars and a pickup passed, their engines fading into the distance. None even slowed, telling him his assailant was likely alone.
He returned the lockbox to the monument’s secret drawer and hurried to the Geo, checking up and down the road. The only sound was a fresh wind rising through the trees. At last he opened the trunk. A stench of blood and death drifted out. Frank Theosopholis lay in a fetal position on his left side, his knees pulled up, his arms crossed loosely at his chest, his nose pressed down into the old carpet. A stiletto protruded from his throat. Twenty years younger than Tice, he had carrot-red hair and a wrestler’s build. With time for only a cursory search, Tice had found cash and the usual prison ID. Maybe he had missed something. He stared.
The wristwatch. He grabbed the hand. Rigor mortis had frozen the muscles. The shoulders and face were stiff, too. In a few more hours, the progressive rigidity would reach the feet. He worked the watch off—a digital Timex. He flipped it over twice and opened the battery compartment. Anger shot through him.
Inside the well was a highly miniaturized GPS tracker, no larger than the head of a finishing nail. So this was how he had been found. Furious, he wanted to grind the damn thing under his heel, destroy it.
Instead, he flicked the tracker onto his palm, closed the watch, and peered around. His gaze settled on the hungry blue jay, still eating. With a cold smile, he advanced. Shrieking, the bird flew off. He crouched. Where the bird had been pecking looked liked hamburger. He pressed the tracker into it.
“Think of it as dessert,” he told the jay. As he backed off, the bird landed again, cocked its head, and hopped back to its meal.
Tice trotted to the Geo. There was a rutted fire-control track ahead. He would conceal the car there and return on foot for the motorcycle. As he climbed in, he weighed the situation. Since the tracker was on Theosopholis, the logical deduction was that Theosopholis was the target. But as soon as the janitor saw Tice, he would have known he had the wrong man and should have withdrawn or attempted a live capture to find out where Theosopholis was. Instead, everything about his style announced wet job. He was assigned to liquidate Tice, and maybe only Tice.
Uneasily, Tice gunned the engine and accelerated away. Whoever had sent the bastard had impressive resources to have ferreted out the unknowable—while Tice still had too much to hide.
Maricopa County, Arizona
From the cab of the big 18-wheeler, Jerry Angelides surveyed the Sonoran Desert. It spread in all directions like a sea of powdered bones. The morning was cold, and the sunlight thin and uncertain. He tried to shake off a bad feeling. Something was going to happen. Brakes huffing, the truck turned and backed up to the warehouse. No other buildings were in sight, but then this area off Interstate 10 boasted far more Gila monsters and rattlesnakes than it did humans. All part of Mr. G’s plan.
As he climbed out of the cab, he told his wheelman, “All you drivers stay put. Everybody else gets out but waits until I check around. Radio them.”
“You got it, Jerry.”
Jerry Angelides was a burly man with a bristle haircut and flat, steely eyes. He wore a sports jacket and dark trousers like always. As he headed for the warehouse, the two men who had been riding in the rear seat jumped out after him, carrying fully loaded Remington 870 pump-action shotguns. Other 18-wheelers backed up, and more men leaped out, cradling 870s. The sides of all of the trucks displayed big blue globes of the world with CROSS-GLOBAL TRANSPORTATION arched above in blue and gold letters.
Angelides walked around the corner of the warehouse, head rotating, looking for anything unusual. He continued on over the hard-packed desert sand, past the cacti and the sun-baked rocks, past the rear of the warehouse, and around to the other side. That was when he saw Mr. Lockyear’s fancy white Cadillac. Mr. Lockyear himself was leaving the warehouse’s side door. He was not supposed to be here unless invited. That was the agreement.
“It’s real early for you, ain’t it?” Mr. Lockyear was fat and sweating.
“I told you to stay away, Mr. Lockyear. You’ve been getting your monthlies, haven’t you?” He sent the rent on the first of the month, FedEx, a thousand dollars cash, which FedEx would not like if they knew.
“Folks around here mind their own business, Jerry, but there’re lines. Real lines. I take ownership seriously.” Lockyear wore a straw hat. His sunglasses had metal frames that sat squarely on his bulging nose. “I think you maybe got things going on here that’re a little fishy. That’s why you don’t mind paying more than usual. Shit, Jerry, it don’t look good.”
“You opened the crates?” Angelides reached inside his sports jacket.
“Well, now, just one crate. I had to, you see—” He froze as he saw the gun in Angelides’s hand. “Wait a minute. I was just going to ask for more change each month. Maybe five hundred. Okay, three. I wasn’t going to tell anyone—”
“Damn right you’re not.” Angelides stepped back and pulled the trigger. The sound of the gunshot was percussive. The big 10mm bullet drilled a red hole right in the bridge of Mr. Lockyear’s sunglasses. The dead man’s face collapsed. There was a rattle in his throat, and he stepped back and fell like one of those carnival dolls.
Angelides sighed. He remembered he had not had a good feeling about this day. He hated it when people broke agreements. He leaned down and wiped blood from his gun hand onto Lockyear’s white shirt. Then he returned the Colt to his shoulder holster. It was his favorite—just a little more than two pounds and only eight and a half inches long, still small enough to be concealable. It was also rechambered for serious 10mm bullets. People who knew anything knew he carried a good weapon.
His men tore around the corner, their shotguns ready. They stared.
“You okay?” one asked, peering at Angelides.
“Sure. Right as rain. That’s the former Mr. Lockyear.” Angelides pointed.
Another chuckled. “You’re cold, Jerry. Real cold.”
“It’s not that I like it,” Angelides explained. “It’s necessary. You say to yourself, is this necessary? And if you have to say yes, then you do it. He won’t cook for a while ’cause he’s in the shade. When you finish loading, put him in his Cadillac and drive him over into that ravine. Now get on round front and open up the trucks.”
He unlocked the side door and went inside to the power panel, where he pushed buttons. The mammoth doors rolled. He hurried out to watch the boys. They stood in a line, staring pizza-eyed at what seemed to be small lightweight dune buggies packed nose-to-tail deep into the shadows. Though they were accustomed to moving stolen goods of all sorts, especially arms and drugs, this was a new one. Two whistled in appreciation.
“They’re called LandFlyers,” Angelides explained, smiling. Each had a skinny little frame on top of four big wheels, plus seats and a cargo pl
atform and a gun mount.
“Jesus,” one said.
“No shit, Jerry. We’re damn far away for a day at the beach!”
As the others laughed, a third man decided, “They must be military.”
“That they are,” Angelides confirmed. “But Uncle Sam hasn’t got anything but prototypes yet. This is the first real shipment.”
“Hey, there’s gun mounts!” said a fourth man. “What do they shoot, Jerry?”
“Fifty-caliber,” he told them. Now they were really impressed.
The man standing next to Angelides shook his head. “There’s too many. No way we can pack that many into the trucks.”
“LandFlyers stack,” Angelides told him. “Like LEGO blocks. That’s why there are truck lifts. See ’em? You’re gonna use the lifts to stack ’em. Now look off to the side—those wood crates. That’s where the fifty-calibers are. Everything goes into the trucks, including the lifts. We leave nothing behind. Got it? Nothing.”
“Except the dead man.”
Angelides’s head whipped around. “Who said that?”
The men laughed. Angelides shrugged. “Load ’em and weep. You’ve got a long ways to drive, and you gotta keep to the schedule. Keys are in the ignitions.”
Several of the LandFlyers’ diesel engines fired up, and Angelides watched as they glided toward the ramps that led up into the big rigs. Land-Flyers could blast across a desert at sixty-five miles an hour, hump over chongo rocks at thirty without going ass over teakettle, and do hairpin turns so sharp they would topple any other all-terrain vehicle. They could even keep running on three wheels if the fourth got shot off. LandFlyers weighed half as much as big-ass Humvees and were a lot shorter and narrower, too, but they carried just as much cargo. They were what the military called light-strike vehicles. He loved American engineering.
Angelides walked away from the noise and dialed his cell. Mr. G was a busy man, so it rang a few times. “Hello, Mr. Ghranditti,” he said respectfully. “The buggies and weapons will be on the road soon. A smooth operation. Like silk.” No point in worrying the boss about the little detail of Mr. Lockyear’s demise. It was handled.
“Well done, Mr. Angelides,” Martin Ghranditti told him. “It’s good to work with a professional such as yourself. You’ll be heading east to help me on this end?”
“You bet. The jet’s waiting in Phoenix. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
4
New York City
As he said good-bye to Jerry Angelides, Martin Ghranditti paced across his Berber carpet. He was a large man of forty-nine, robust in health, well over six feet tall. Cosmopolitan by birth and inclination, he wore tailored ten-thousand-dollar suits—today’s was dark charcoal gray with 22-karat-gold pinstripes. With his perpetual tan and threads of silver in his ebony hair, he looked sophisticated and multicultural, easily passing as the high-powered financial investor and philanthropist he advertised himself to be.
In truth, he was far more: He moved seamlessly from the dirty underbelly of illegal weapons sales to glittering national politics, from business deals with Western tycoons to corporate arrangements with hard-core terrorists training in Oregon and the Sudan. Recently he was a guest at a summit of Islamic militants in Beirut that included al-Qaeda and a secret new umbrella group that was revolutionizing the way the religious fanatics operated. Soon he would attend the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington with lobbyists and senators and the president.
He had been on his cell phone an hour, closing the deal for an island in the South Pacific. It had been a headache of international red tape, but the transaction was finished now, and his wife would be pleased. Pleasing her was everything.
He dialed again. “Did you send your man after Theosopholis?” “Yes, but he’s missing, too.” There was worry in the voice. “So I sent a team to find both of them, but the GPS signal turned out to be in a tree. Then a bird flew off, and the signal went with it.”
Ghranditti frowned. “What does a bird have to do with Theosopholis and Tice?”
The voice hesitated. “We think Tice must’ve found the tracker and somehow attached it to the bird. Theosopholis isn’t that smart.”
“What!”
“We think Tice must’ve—”
“No, no! Stop.” Ghranditti grimaced, barely controlling his bitter hatred of Tice. “So you’re telling me that not only did Tice and Theosopholis break out, the man you sent to find them is gone, too. And you’ve wasted one hell of a lot of time chasing a goddamned bird!”
“It wasn’t like that—”
“Yes, it was! Tice is mocking you. Daring you. Laughing at you! I’ll tell you where your man is—he’s dead. Tice has liquidated him. Otherwise, you would’ve heard from him. I warned you, but you thought it’d be easy because of Theosopholis. Never underestimate Tice. Never! I don’t care what it costs, or how many people you need. Find Tice!”
Aloft, flying north to Pennsylvania
The air was dry and cool, the ventilation system breathy in the aging Gulf-stream II. Elaine Cunningham sat beside a window, the only passenger in the twelve-seat turbojet, waiting impatiently. The moment the plane was safely airborne, she opened her computer and checked for an e-mail from Mark Silliphant. There was one:
Am working fast, but this is going to take some time.
Not unexpected. She set the computer aside and picked up Jay Tice’s dossier—then stopped. He was no drunk or spendthrift like Rick Ames, no pious malcontent like Bob Hanssen. In fact, just the opposite. She opened the file folder and reread the top sheet—a short, unsigned analysis:
Jay Tice was known for doing it all. He was a brilliant strategist, tactician, and superspy. As a spymaster, he was one of the Cold War’s top recruiters and runners of networks of spies, agents, assets, and moles. The CIA awarded him six medals, and three presidents honored him with four covert citations. . . .
She remembered vividly how his arrest had shocked the intelligence community: If the best of the best was a traitor, whom could you trust? Maybe not your boss. Maybe not your partner. Morale plunged, and politicians, pundits, and the press closed in for the media kill, blasting the CIA as a stumbling mastodon, humiliatingly inept. There had been no place to hide, no salve.
What Tice had done to the country still enraged her, but a good hunter began with no preconceptions, no judgments. Nothing to inhibit seeing the smallest detail for what it was, uncolored by emotion or attitude. As the turbojet sliced through the azure sky, she calmed herself. Moscow had paid Tice some $2 million for his treachery, but in her experience, vanity or greed was usually too simple an answer to be useful.
She flipped through printouts, reading. Finding an old report written when Tice joined the CIA, she highlighted a section that struck her as important.
. . . born August 6, 1951. His father, George, owned a Ford dealership in Denver. His mother, Ruth, was a homemaker. He had one sibling, a younger brother, Aaron. The family lived in Cherry Creek, an expensive Denver suburb. The boys attended private schools.
Beginning in elementary school, Tice had increasingly low marks, finally failing his junior year in high school. But when he repeated it, he made straight A’s. That year, for the first time, he took up extracurricular activities. The next year his grades were again all A’s, and he led debate and track teams to state championships.
He served one tour in Vietnam in the Marine Corps, earning a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts, then was admitted to Stanford University but on academic probation because of his early low grades. Again he outperformed, graduating summa cum laude while debating, acting in plays, and running track. He set records in the 100 and 400.
His brother enlisted in the U.S. Army and was killed in the DMZ between North and South Korea. Tice’s parents died subsequently of natural causes.
Tice was recruited at Yale while studying for a master’s degree in international affairs.
Curious about Tice’s early low grades, she studied a health questionnaire he had fille
d out about his childhood. It included a list of broken bones and emergency trips to a variety of doctors and hospitals throughout Denver. Seldom did he see the same doctor twice. She wondered whether he had been abused, which would help to explain his problems in school. As it turned out, his first CIA interviewer had confronted Tice with the same question:
Tice: My father had a temper, and he drank. It was the usual boring story. As I recall, Sophocles wrote in Oedipus Rex, “God keep you from the knowledge of who you are.” [Interviewer’s note: Quotation is accurate.] That was my father. He was a mean, little man who made a lot of money because it was the thing to do. But it didn’t make him happy. He took it out on my mother, my brother, and me. Mother thought Aaron and I could accomplish anything. She always said we were the hope of the family. Aaron and I got out as soon as we could. She didn’t live long after Aaron died.
Elaine put aside her sympathy for Tice’s troubled childhood. At the same time, the abuse had to be factored into his profile. CIA recruits who reported fearing for their lives in childhood because of trauma such as abuse, severe illness, or war often struggled with ordinary survival tests at the Farm. On the other hand, when life-or-death stakes or threats of torture were incorporated, their attitude tended to become “If I survive this, I can survive anything.” Ultimately, they often proved more resilient and higher-performing than other recruits and ended up being especially fine covert operatives.
She laid the printout on her lap and sat back, mulling. Jay Tice had translated his early difficulties into a drive to excel, which meant he shared characteristics with others who had the drive: When they failed at something they felt crucial, they often set higher goals the next time, hoping to erase the past with telling, even inspiring success. They were realistic in crisis, not blindly optimistic. They analyzed their disasters and made changes. They searched for meaning in results. And they were usually the family’s nominee as the hope for the future. She reread: “we were the hope of the family.” And finally, not only could they act on what others had to teach—they looked for mentors.
