by Gayle Lynds
“Don’t bother,” Jay said smoothly. “We dropped her off at a friend’s house. She finally admitted she was in over her head.”
“Really?” Elijah said, disappointed. “I thought she was tougher than that. Damn. Sorry to lose her. Palmer, you want to handle the report to Jay?”
“Absolutely.” Filled with concern, the older man’s voice gave no hint of duplicity, either. “It’s an understatement to say we’ve got a nasty kettle of silverfish on our hands, Jay. Glad you’re sitting down. Take a deep breath. The news is Ghranditti’s shipment appears to be nothing but high-tech—which is bad enough. Far worse, it’s not just any high-tech. It’s fucking state-of-the-art. Everything—absolutely everything—is cutting-edge. The U.S. government’s best, latest, most covert, most ingenious—and deadly. Plus it covers the whole spectrum—weapons to intelligence gathering, detection to communications.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Elijah admitted. “I’ll read you the list.”
Jay turned on the speakerphone so Raina could hear. As Elijah talked, her eyebrows rose, and she paled.
When he finished, Elijah concluded worriedly, “No one’s ever assembled anything like this for even a friendly government.”
Jay took a deep breath. “If the Majlis get all this, God help the world!”
Elaine pushed through a throng of tourists and dashed down the steps of L’Enfant Plaza and into the underground mall, listening to the careening noise of the Whippet operatives chasing her.
Covered in sweat, her lungs heaving, she shoved her Walther into her purse and slowed to a quick walk, ignoring the stares of shoppers and commuters heading to catch the Metro. Ducking into Harper’s, a small women’s clothing store, she wove among the goods until she reached a distant wall where she could see the door. With luck, her pursuers would rush past and she could slip back out and escape.
At last she saw them through the window—the big man with the broad chest in the lead, his face red and murderous. He paused to talk to the others and sent them off in different directions. Then he turned to enter the shop. Her chest tight, she dropped low and crawled under hanging racks, heading back toward the door. She watched the shoes of the big man and two others as they stalked inside, their feet heavy. They stopped occasionally. Finally their knees bent. They were going to look under the clothing.
She grabbed the top of the metal rack and pulled herself up among long dresses. She could taste her sweat as it streamed down her face. Her arms began to ache. At last she heard the feet return to the door. Again they stopped. With relief, she let herself down softly.
“You stay here,” a basso voice ordered quietly. “Watch for her. She’s got to be around somewhere.”
Raina drove east. The sun had disappeared, and dusk had swallowed the golden light of sunset. They had received more phone calls from Elijah then Palmer, asking whether they were all right and where they were. Jay had dodged their questions smoothly.
As Raina stopped the car at a red light, she looked closely at him, feeling a strange curiosity. The geometry of his jaw had softened, and age lines etched his skin. As they always had, his hazel-colored eyes gave a sense of ice chips from a glass of fine bourbon, cold and brittle, while she sensed, as she used to, he secretly wanted to be warmed by the right human hands. He was still very handsome, and there was a muscularity to him that made him seem as physical as ever. She had a fleeting memory of what a principled man she had once thought him.
After he tried to call Elaine again, Raina could feel him studying her, although he was clearly not seeing her. It gave her a strange sensation to remember his habits so well: “You’re trying to figure out something, aren’t you?”
He nodded. “We used to do this together. Help me, will you? Now that we know how unusually dangerous Ghranditti’s shipment is, I’ve been trying to understand what in hell is going on with Larry Litchfield. Information is power, and ForeTell is the planet’s most effective vehicle to deliver information. But he’s apparently selling it to the Majlis al-Sha’b despite knowing as much or more than we do about how dangerous they are. Has he gone insane?”
“Maybe the answer is more complex than madness or greed.” The light turned green, and she drove off.
Suddenly Jay sat up straight. “I think you’re right.” He peered at the traffic then at her. “Back in the eighties, the White House ordered NSA to ‘penetrate banks to combat money-laundering and other criminal activities and illegal sales of high technology to the Soviet Union.’ I remember one of NSA’s solutions was to install a backdoor in a forerunner of ForeTell. A backdoor is a few lines of code hidden inside hundreds of thousands of lines of programming instructions. Then no matter where the software is used, Baghdad or Paris or Timbuktu, all you have to do wherever you are is hit the right keystrokes and you can track employees, take money from bank accounts, manufacture records—even change the trajectory of missiles or download everything in their database. And you can do it without leaving any footprints, no audit trail at all that you were there.
“In those days, it was the most powerful software in the world. So Langley created front companies to peddle the backdoor version. A lot of nations snapped it up—France, Canada, Germany, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, to name a few. So did a lot of multinationals, including all of the big wire-transfer clearinghouses in America and Europe. Mossad got into the game, too, with their own backdoor. The intel was so extraordinary that we stopped assassinations and savage attacks. Then somehow word leaked out, as it always does eventually, about what we were doing. The news spread like an epidemic among IT people. When no one could find the backdoor lines of code, everyone destroyed their software. And suddenly our ocean of intel went dry.”
She had an awful feeling. “There was no reason to bring in Kristoph to make ‘final adjustments’ on ForeTell—it was already finished. So you think Litchfield used him to design a backdoor!”
Jay clasped his hands in his lap, weaving the fingers into a knot so tight his knuckles turned white. “Bin Laden’s people knew about the first backdoor, because he had one of the versions. That means al-Hadi and the Majlis would immediately suspect anyone who wanted to sell them ForeTell. Their prejudice that we’re all just greedy, godless infidels would work in Litchfield’s favor if he offered it to them for a large amount of money—but it wouldn’t be enough for them to take the risk. That’s why I figure Litchfield’s working with Ghranditti. Ghranditti’s shipment is such a threat to us that the Majlis have to believe Litchfield wouldn’t gamble on letting them have it and the software—unless all he really did care about was the cash.”
“Good Lord. Litchfield is insane. The Majlis could find out tomorrow the software’s dirty and never even use it, and they’d still have the high-tech shipment!”
He grimaced. “They could kill tens of thousands, if not millions, of us.”
Shocked, they fell silent. As the lights from other vehicles flashed into the car, she tried to find a solution.
Suddenly Jay’s eyes narrowed. “We’ve got to take the fight to Ghranditti.” He dialed his cell.
His fingers hammering the keyboard of his wireless laptop, Frank Mesa sat alone on a park bench under a towering maple tree in Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House. Cloaked in evening shadows, just outside the rim of one of the park’s lamplights, he had been making phone calls, collecting information about Martin Ghranditti.
His cell phone lit up. He noted the number and answered. “Yes, Jay?”
Jay’s voice was taut. “What’s the latest about Ghranditti? Are you getting close to finding out where the shipment’s going to change hands?”
Frank frowned. He had not made nearly the progress he wanted. “Ghranditti’s done a damn good job of hiding himself. I’ve got nothing new about the shipment. For a while I thought I was getting close to finding at least one of those shell companies Palmer thought Ghranditti had, but it turned out to be just a realty firm in Northern Virginia he’s done business with
. But through it, I was able to track two residences. He owns one in Miami Beach with so much security it could be a bank vault. The other’s here in D.C., a penthouse. It’s up for sale in one of those quiet, hoity-toity arrangements where there’s no sign on the door, and any parties interested in purchasing it have to prove they’ve got a million bucks in the bank even to view it.”
“Sounds as if Ghranditti’s planning to disappear after the deal closes. If we don’t get him now, we may lose him forever.”
“That’s my guess, Jay.”
There was a pause, and Frank could almost hear the wheels in Jay’s brain spinning with ideas. “You’ve got a suggestion?” he prompted hopefully.
“Get me a key to that penthouse. Maybe I can find something there about the shipment.”
Frank smiled to himself. “I’ll give you a call when I have it, and we can arrange for you to pick it up. Bye, Jay.”
“We’re not finished.” Another pause, and Jay’s tone grew heavy with warning: “I’m going to say something that might not make a lot of sense, Frank, so you’ll have to trust me. Something’s brewing, and Palmer or Elijah might be part of it. Don’t breathe a word to either of them that we’ve talked.”
The minutes passed slowly where Elaine hid nervously beneath the dresses in Harper’s clothing shop. Her sweat dried, and her skin itched. The man continued to lurk in the doorway. Finally his feet shifted more and more frequently. He was restless. When he called a thank-you to the clerk and stalked off, Elaine sighed with relief.
After five minutes she crawled under the clothes toward the door. Evening shoppers passed intermittently in the corridor. But there was also a man’s shadow, cast by the underground mall’s strange illumination. He was still on guard but positioned on the other side of the door from the store window.
Cursing silently, she scuttled to another rack, where she grabbed brown trousers and a matching jacket and a black T-shirt. Still hidden, she changed, then crab-walked down the aisle and pulled a black slouch hat from a display pole and tucked her hair up underneath. She removed the paper funnel she had zipped into a side pocket of her purse and carefully unfurled it on the floor, wary of the tips of the darts inside. It seemed incredible that it was only yesterday afternoon in Franklin Park that the Whippet operative had shot the darts at her, trying to scrub her.
Holding one of the darts by its flight, she rose until her eyes were above the dresses. The clerk had moved to another area and was helping a mother and daughter.
Elaine stared then dropped down and crawled toward the door. The shadow was still there. She eased out. He was a man of medium height with an almost boneless face and a look of intense boredom, but the tension in his body told her he was also on high alert. Suddenly he noticed her.
As he looked straight at her, she rammed the tip of the dart into his calf. He grunted. In an instant, his arms uncrossed. His weapon, with its long sound suppressor, pointed at her. As she fell back inside the doorway, he pulled the trigger. The pop was loud in the quiet mall, reverberating from tiled and concrete surfaces.
“Get down!” Elaine yelled at the women in the shop.
She rolled under the clothes and ripped her Walther from her purse. Then rolled back toward the door in time to see the man stagger inside. His eyes were crazed with fury and poison; his skin gray. But as soon as he spotted her, he aimed again. She sprang forward and crashed her shoulder into his knees. She heard one snap. He grunted and went down like a tower of blocks, his finger reflexively pulling the trigger. The shot splintered the floor next to her. Within seconds she was up and out the door. She looked both ways and ran.
43
Near the Mall, Jay Tice trudged through yellow pools of lamplight toward a concrete sidewalk planter, limping slightly. His shoulders were rounded, his lips downturned in a grimace, emphasizing the elderly age he pretended. Pedestrians flooded past as he sank onto the planter’s wall. He checked around carefully then slid his hand back under the decorative rock Frank had described. His fingers probed. At last he found the freshly made elevator key to Martin Ghranditti’s penthouse and retrieved it. Staying in character, he limped away.
The Mustang stopped at the curb. He climbed inside.
“It was there?” Raina asked anxiously as she drove back into the traffic.
“Exactly where Frank said.” He pulled out his SIG Sauer and handed it to her. “You may need this. It’s loaded.”
She glanced at it and slid it inside her waistband. A neutral mask settled over her face, a mask that reminded him of his own.
As she turned the corner, heading toward Ghranditti’s place, he studied her. Her eyes were cool and intelligent in the shadowy interior, completely professional. Still, the undercurrent of towering sorrow and rage was also there, tangible.
He might never have another chance. “You’re still very angry with me.”
Her brows shot up. Her wide-set eyes were the color of lapis lazuli—and now flaming with fury. But her voice was controlled as she said, “Of course I’m angry. You broke our agreement. You stayed CIA, and not only wouldn’t you let me out, you turned me into a sleeper. I was trapped. Kristoph was trapped.”
“Langley came to me—”
“I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Yes, it does, or you wouldn’t be so damn mad. If it’s any comfort, I was just doing my duty—”
“Kristoph’s dead. In effect, you killed him! Was that your duty?”
Pain knifed through him. In a way, she was right. He gathered himself. Then: “We both know you’re here for Kristoph, not for me or you, although I wish you were. This Ghranditti and Litchfield situation is too big for either of us, but together we have a chance.” When she started to object, he shook his head hard. “We’ve got to settle things between us.”
And he stopped talking. Waited. Felt her peer at him a moment. He looked just in time to see it was not at him she stared but off through the cocoon of the car, past the hum of the engine and the clotted street and Washington’s grand buildings and into the distance, as if searching for another time, a better world, another chance.
“The past isn’t sacred,” he said. “Don’t let it dictate the future.”
Like a gun, her gaze homed in on him. “You’re doing it again. Words. ‘The past isn’t sacred.’ Of course it is—to you. You’ve always been so noble. The great spymaster. The man of a thousand faces, a thousand eyes, a thousand wiles. Trusted, honored, revered. But you broke our agreement without consulting me. You dictated our future and put Kristoph and me in a position neither of us ever wanted!”
A queasy feeling slid through him.
“You talked me into being a mole for you,” she continued more calmly. “Then you talked me into being a BND mole, but it wasn’t just so I could work for democracy, for the future of Germany. You’d studied the economic intelligence of the Soviet Union and realized it was collapsing. So you prepared. You maneuvered and manipulated me as only you could do. Your real goal was to make sure I’d be taken care of later, in case you couldn’t.”
“I don’t understand why you’re so upset—”
“Be quiet and listen! Yes, that meant after the Wall fell I’d have a job, a place in the New Germany, while everyone else in the Stasi would never be able to find legitimate work. But that set me up for Erich Eisner to turn me into a national symbol. I hated it because it was a lie. Kristoph hated it because he was young, and the glare of my celebrity was so blinding he couldn’t see who he was. He had to take my mother’s name to try to make his own way. You even denied him his own name! And now it’s led to this. He’s dead, and I can’t go home if I want to live.”
He started to speak.
She waved a hand dismissively, silencing him. “All you had to do was keep our agreement.” Her voice brimmed with disgust. “All you had to do was quit. It was that simple. Retire.”
“I couldn’t.” He was holding the car’s armrest in a death grip. The only thing he had left w
as the truth, but it was a truth he did not want to tell.
“Langley needed me. No, wait. Let me finish. Just because the Cold War was over didn’t mean my work was. The world was heading into un-charted political territory, and I had institutional memory. I had experience and expertise and the sort of reputation that reminded the Oval Office of Langley’s tremendous value. So of course the seventh floor came to me. By then the DCI and DDO knew about you. I told them you wanted out. When their silence stretched, I flew back to Langley to convince them to release both of us. That’s how I discovered they planned to turn you into a mole, spying against Germany, and if you resisted, they’d expose your Cold War work for us.”
As she continued to drive, her eyebrows shot up with shock. “They’d blackmail me? Use the help I gave . . . the terrifying risks I took . . . to blackmail me?”
He could not look at her. “The only way to protect both of you was to bargain them into making you a sleeper. That was the best I could do, and that’s why I pursued the promotion to DDO. I needed to be right there at Langley to make sure you were allowed to continue to sleep.”
“Oh, dear Lord. I had no idea.”
A hush filled the dark car, and an ocean of regret.
“And Moscow?” she said. “Why did you turn? How could you go against everything we worked for? Everything we believed in!”
He hesitated. He pressed a fist against his chest, felt the beat of his heart. His mouth was dry as he said, “I didn’t turn.” He looked at her.
She blinked several times as if unable to comprehend. “What happened?” she asked softly.
“Bobbye Johnson got a call from Moses that he had a client who was going to expose you. He was going to tell the media you’d worked for us during the Cold War and were sleeping for us with the BND now—and that you were behind Pavel Abendroth’s assassination. Plus he’d give details to the Mossad.” As a renowned dissident and Jewish refusenik, Dr. Abendroth had been a particular hero in Israel.
