The Wrong Man

by Jason Dean

  Costa left a five-dollar bill and exited the diner, waiting until Bishop reached the end of the street before following.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Standing in front of a convenience store, Bishop studied the five-storey building across the street. Straight away he could tell that the classiest thing about the Ambassador Hotel was its name. The building’s shabby facade suggested its glory years were far in the past, if they ever existed at all.

  It looked perfect.

  The hotel was located on a street seventeen blocks north of Aleron’s, with several boarded-up storefronts acting as neighbours. Further down on the left was a bleak-looking office complex. On this side, a couple of bars, an all-night diner, a video rental store and the convenience store shared space with apartments and private residences.

  Bishop waited for a gap in the traffic, crossed over, and entered the hotel.

  The foyer contained eight uncomfortable-looking easy chairs and a couple of tables containing magazines. One man sat watching the TV in the far left corner. Another sat near the windows, listening to his personal music player while reading an old issue of Entertainment Weekly. He glanced up briefly at Bishop before returning to it. Straight ahead Bishop saw the elevator bank next to a set of stairs, and a wide corridor that he assumed led to the rear of the building. At his right, a bespectacled man sat behind the long reception counter, watching Bishop as he approached. He looked to be in his mid to late forties and had unnaturally brown hair and the lined face of a lifelong smoker.

  ‘Help you?’ he said. The name on the plaque in front of him read Tyler Marks.

  ‘I need a room for tonight,’ Bishop said.

  Marks made a show of looking down at Bishop’s missing luggage. ‘Last minute decision, huh?’

  Bishop smiled. ‘The girlfriend came back a day early and didn’t like what she found. Had to make do with what I could grab.’

  Marks smirked and said, ‘Rooms are sixty a night in advance. Checkout’s at eleven. All rooms got a TV. I’ll need some ID. Rules, you know?’

  ‘Where would we be without them?’ Bishop said. He took some notes from his pocket and counted out sixty in twenties and tens. Placed them on the counter along with his new licence.

  Marks compared the photo to the face in front of him. Then he took the money and placed it somewhere out of view. ‘Just one night, is it?’

  ‘Yeah. Or until Christine gets over it.’

  Marks snorted. ‘Don’t hold your breath, Mr Allbright. You’re lucky you still got a pair. Okay, you wanna fill this in and I’ll get your key.’

  Bishop took a pen from the holder and filled spaces on the registration form. Marks slid a key over with 308 printed on the metal fob. Bishop pushed the form back, took the key and watched Marks compare the details with those on his licence. Then Marks handed the licence back and said, ‘Elevators just over there. Enjoy your stay.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Bishop. But he saw that Marks had already refocused his attention on the TV and was no longer listening.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Bishop decided the room would do. it was located at the rear of the hotel, looked relatively clean and contained a bed, a shower and a TV. There was also a fire escape outside the window with a metal ladder leading to the street below. He’d already checked where the hallway downstairs led and found the rear fire door. Opening it hadn’t set off any alarms, either.

  He’d visited another internet café on the way here and now he took the nine pages he’d printed out of his pocket and unfolded them. Thorpe had delivered the information as promised. Bishop slipped off his shoes and jacket and lay down on the bed with the pages in his hand.

  The top sheet was a photocopied, grainy enlargement of a passport photo. The man looking back at him had a thick neck, short, dark, naturally wavy hair, slightly off-kilter eyes that dropped down at the edges and, of course, the long nose atop a straight mouth and the cleft chin and sunken cheeks Bishop remembered. So here it was, the first step in Bishop’s search for who set him up. All in all, an average-looking face you wouldn’t look at twice if you passed it in the street. Probably just one of many reasons the CIA recruiters approached him during his last year of college.

  The other eight pages gave a brief summary of his agency and postagency career. Bishop started in at the beginning.

  Adam Cortiss joined the agency on August 15, 1984. He spent the next two years at their training facility at Camp Pearly, Virginia with a curriculum that included paramilitary training, countersurveillance techniques, and interrogation methods. He re-entered the world as a newly minted, fully qualified CIA operations officer in June 1986.

  His first two years in the field, from 1986 to 1988, were spent based in US embassies in a variety of hot spots like Haiti and Kenya, recruiting suitable assets for his new employers. The résumé was short on specifics, but Bishop assumed ‘suitable’ in this case meant a combination of guillibility, greed and general hostility towards one’s fellow man. The kind of qualities the CIA usually looked for in a source. Code names like ‘Operation Good Girl’ or ‘Operation Deep Steel’ got mentions, but without the actual agency files to hand Bishop could only guess at their meaning.

  He assumed Cortiss was successful, as the following two years saw him in Afghanistan helping to arrange the transport of certain Afghans and Arabs to the US for military training as part of ‘Operation Cyclone’.

  Bishop recognized that code name, all right. The operation that armed, trained and financed what would later become the Taliban had come in for a lot of criticism since the events of 9/11. Most of it deserved, in Bishop’s opinion. He’d served for eight years and regretted nothing, but his country’s frequent shortsightedness when it came to foreign policy still amazed him. You couldn’t keep arming and financing groups like that and not expect it to come back and bite you in the ass in the long run. But the decision makers never seemed to learn. Probably never would, either.

  According to the data, Cortiss had arranged entry visas for ‘recruiter trainers’ and found them apartments on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn; in the very same block Bin Laden set up his own recruitment offices for ‘freedom fighters’. Bishop once read that he’d utilized the services of the more extreme elements that passed through those doors to lay the seeds for al-Qaeda.

  In 1993, Cortiss was part of a multi-agency coalition assigned the task of toppling the Guatemalan president, Jorge Serrano Elias, who’d recently taken it upon himself to suspend the country’s constitution. Two months later, Cortiss left Guatemala under the care of its new president, Ramiro de Leon Carpio.

  In 1994, he turned up in Afghanistan again on a long-term reconnaissance mission concerning the mujahideen’s courier network for smuggling opium out of the country. Bishop had to smile at that one. ‘Reconnaissance’ could be a euphemism for so many things.

  Cortiss also got a mention at a congressional hearing in 1996 as someone who ‘might have been present’ during the interrogation and torture of six student agitators in the Dominican Republic. And he was ignominiously expelled from Greece in 1999 for behaviour ‘incompatible with his diplomatic status’. Which, in Bishop’s estimation, could mean almost anything. But probably nothing good.

  So it was no real surprise to Bishop to learn of his exit from the agency in June 2001. Budget cuts were the reasons given, but Bishop knew better than that. The adverse publicity resulting from the Greek expulsion just meant it was probably more cost effective for them to cut their losses and pay him off than to keep him on and risk getting more. And then in November the same year, Brennan hired him as an advance point man in his domestic and overseas business negotiations. No mention given to their parting of the ways a few years later, though.

  Bishop had to admit, the guy got around. Mixed with some nice company, too.

  He kept coming back to one entry in particular. On the fourth page. It was from Berlin in 1990 and concerned the Rosenholz files: a collection of four hundred CDs packed with invaluable info on agents of the
HVA, East Germany’s foreign intelligence service. They were widely believed to be stored at the Ministry for State Security, headquarters of that country’s not-so-secret police, the Stasi. The entry implied that Cortiss had been a member of a small assault team involved in a break-in at the Ministry on January 15. At the scene, the police found seven dead officials and guards with single shots to the head. And no Rosenholz files anywhere on the grounds. It took the guys at Langley a year to admit they had them in their possession, but not how they got them.

  A professional, well-organized night raid on a well-protected fortress that resulted in a high body count. The whole operation sounded a little too similar to the Brennan attack for Bishop’s liking. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Cortiss had arranged other such incursions in the years since. Perhaps not high profile enough to make it into this file. There was a definite modus operandi at work here.

  Thing was, if Bishop were to believe the official story, Cortiss was also dead.

  A full year before the Brennan raid took place, Cortiss apparently lost control of his BMW while driving back from a restaurant in Washington DC. He crashed into the back of a heavy-duty gravel truck and died instantly. The authorities found plenty of identification on him and a distant cousin living in Massachusetts named Sean Stephenson officially identified the body. Bishop checked to see if there was any reference to where Cortiss had been buried. Unsurprisingly, according to the police report, Stephenson had him immediately cremated. All very neat and tidy.

  Placing the papers at his side, Bishop yawned and looked at his watch. It was 18.17 now and his eyelids felt like they had weights attached to them. In the last thirty-six hours the only sleep he’d had was the four hours he’d spent unconscious in the prison hospital. His body needed rest. Yawning again, he dropped his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes.

  THIRTY

  At 9.13 p.m. two black-and-whites silently coasted down the quiet street before parking diagonally in front of the Ambassador. They were joined within seconds by a third. Then a fourth vehicle, a grey four-door Chevrolet, arrived from the opposite direction and double-parked a few spaces down.

  Two women and one man emerged from the Chevrolet all wearing windbreakers with US MARSHAL written in large white letters on the backs. One also wore a black cap. As if on cue, the doors on the other vehicles opened and five uniforms quietly swarmed around the Marshals like a protective detail.

  The one wearing the cap gesticulated with her hands as she gave her orders, pointing down the street to the left of the hotel, then in the opposite direction. One policeman followed her first command and ran two hundred yards until he reached the doorway of a boarded-up store. He waited there, hand on his holster. Another did the same in the other direction, this time holing up in the shadows of the entrance to the underground car park that served the tenants of the office building. The other three policemen stayed with the Marshal while she gave further instructions.

  Loose groups of pedestrians hung around to stare and a few more waited on the sidewalk opposite the hotel to see what was happening. The two policemen at their guard posts stopped anyone on the hotel side from getting any closer.

  A man with a heavily lined face and a bad dye job emerged from the hotel entrance and strode over to the group. The lead Marshal spoke to him briefly and he nodded emphatically. She asked him something else and he shook his head and spoke a few words in response. Then he went back inside.

  The Marshal jerked her head up, scanning the immediate area. She pulled a walkie-talkie from her belt and brought it to her mouth. Before she had a chance to speak, a fifth cruiser arrived and just as silently parked in front of the convenience store on the other side of the street. She waited as a patrolman got out the passenger side and ran across the street to her. The driver emerged from his side but didn’t follow, just came round the vehicle to the sidewalk and leaned his elbows on the roof of his car.

  After a brief conversation his partner returned and gave him their new orders. Then he jogged down the sidewalk to the left and moved the onlookers on his side. The driver turned as two men and a woman exited the convenience store and he told each of them to keep walking to the right. Then he leaned on the car again and watched the hotel.

  The Marshal who’d been giving all the orders spoke into her walkie-talkie for a few seconds and then pulled a Glock 19 from her side holster. Her colleagues and the three patrolmen did likewise. Then they all followed her into the hotel.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Standing with his back to the convenience store, the patrolman flinched when the barrel of the Beretta pressed against his right kidney, but didn’t turn around or move his hands from the car roof.

  ‘That’s right,’ Bishop said, ‘we’re all friends here. No sudden moves. You wouldn’t believe how nervous I get.’

  ‘I believe you,’ the cop said.

  ‘That’s a promising start. Hold that thought.’

  A sudden spasm in Bishop’s stomach had jerked him awake at 20.55. He’d allowed the pain to sit with him for a while, the throbbing concentrating his mind, and then he’d forced himself up. Now, though, he was glad he had. Were it not for the overriding compulsion to buy more painkillers he’d still be in the Ambassador. Instead, deciding the less Marks knew of his comings and goings the better, he had grabbed his jacket and gun and left the hotel via the fire exit out back, circling round to reach the all-night store across the street. He’d just paid for the Advil, along with a Coke and a two-day-old hot dog heated up in the store microwave, when the patrol car came to a stop outside.

  Bishop had taken a large bite of the hot dog as he approached the window and assessed the situation outside. He hadn’t seen or heard them go in, but the Chevy was the same one he’d seen on the news this morning. Which meant Marshals. With the two cops stationed across the street and the two on this side, he figured two more would take the rear. Maybe one or two on the roof. Another one in the lobby. Delaney and her deputies would no doubt handle room 308 themselves. Bishop looked left and right. He couldn’t see any black-and-whites blocking the ends of the street yet, but more cops would come. They always did.

  Valuable seconds ticked by as he waited for the driver on the other side of the window to move away from his car and allow him to exit the store and disappear from all their lives without any fuss. But the cop didn’t move.

  And Bishop couldn’t stay here. As soon as they found his room empty they’d lock the perimeter down for witnesses. And more back-up could arrive at any moment. He had to leave. Immediately.

  ‘Okay,’ he told the cop, ‘I’m gonna reach down for your gun and eject the shells, then place it back in your holster. Just stay still and imagine you’re on a tightrope a thousand feet up. The slightest wrong move and you fall. We both will.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Glancing around, Bishop saw that nobody was interested in them. Two hundred yards to his left, the cop’s partner was in front of one of the bars arguing with three patrons who evidently wanted to stay and watch the show. The other two standing guard across the street were embroiled in their own efforts to keep the growing band of spectators back. Bishop smiled. You just had to love New York.

  Keeping pressure on the Beretta in the cop’s back, Bishop used his left hand to unclip the safety clasp on the man’s holster, pull the .357 out and flip the chamber open in less than two seconds. He shook the gun a couple of times until all six shells fell into the gutter. Then he flipped the chamber home and replaced it in the holster. Bishop still needed this guy and allowing him some semblance of dignity by not taking his weapon would make him less likely to do something stupid.

  ‘That’s real good,’ he said. ‘We’re taking each other seriously. What’s gonna happen now is we’re both gonna get in your cruiser and drive away from here.’

  ‘The world and his old lady’s looking for you, Bishop,’ the cop said. ‘You won’t last a minute.’

  ‘Maybe a minute’s all I need. What’s your name,
patrolman?’

  ‘Prior. Cliff Prior.’

  ‘Where are your car keys, Cliff?’

  ‘Left jacket pocket.’

  Bishop increased the pressure on the Beretta as he reached round with his left hand and pulled the keys out. He also unlatched the cuffs from the cop’s belt and put them in his own pocket. ‘Okay, Cliff,’ he said, ‘bring your arms down slowly from the roof and open the door.’

  The cop did as he was told and pulled the door ajar. No interior lights came on, as per regulations.

  ‘On three, get in and move quickly over to the driver’s seat with your hands on the wheel at ten and two. I’ll be right behind you. Got it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Prior said. ‘I got it.’

  ‘Good. Here we go. One. Two. Three.’

  Prior ducked into the car and clambered across to the driver’s seat, his legs just avoiding the bulky radio equipment and bracketed laptop. Bishop slid into the passenger seat and closed the door behind him. He motioned with his gun for Prior to put his hands on the wheel. As the cop complied, Bishop lowered himself down in the seat.

  He turned the radios off and dropped the keys onto the cop’s lap as Prior looked back at him. He was in his mid-twenties, clean-shaven, with deep acne scars. No longer a rookie but hardly a veteran. His eyebrows slanted downwards and met above his nose in a permanent V of disapproval. The small eyes burned into Bishop, no doubt committing his face to memory while his mind weighed the options before him. Experience would be telling him he’d probably get through this if he just followed orders.

  ‘Start her up and drive straight ahead,’ Bishop said. ‘And no screeching of tyres or stalling the engine. You’re too smart for that and I’m too fragile.’