Jack in the Box

by John Weisman

  She greeted him with a piece of buttered toast and a CIA mug of steaming coffee. “I’m at my best in the mornings, Sam, so I tend to get up early.”

  He sat at the green Formica kitchen table and watched her sort the prescription bottles and vials into groups, open them one by one, and count out pills. “Sixteen a day,” she said. “Soon I’m going to need a chart to remember them all, and what sequence they have to be consumed. Soon after that, someone will have to feed them to me. They cost me eight thousand dollars last year.” She swallowed a handful of medications. “Don’t get old, Sam. Don’t get useless. Even Purgatory is better than Oblivion.”

  “I didn’t know I had a choice.”

  She cackled at him. Then her face grew serious. “Sam, did you bring Charlotte any paper?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “How good is it, Sam?”

  “I think we’ve got gold, Charlotte, but you’ll have to pan for it.”

  “Good boy.” Charlotte’s eyes brightened. “Charlotte likes to find pure gold. Now, you give everything to me.”

  Sam went to his briefcase and pulled a trio of thick files out. “Here you go.”

  She clasped the documents to her bosom. “Go away, Sam. Watch the telly, or read, or go jogging, or do whatever you want to do.” She gave him a coy smile. “Charlotte wants to be alone. Charlotte wants to sluice for gold on her own.”

  11:30. Sam ran his five miles, showered, read the newspaper coyer to cover, and sat in the Florida room off the kitchen staring at CNN for an hour and a half. Finally, he pulled himself out of the Barcalounger, padded to Charlotte’s office, cracked the door, and stuck his nose inside.

  It was an oven in there. She’d covered the windows with sheets so no one could observe her from the street. And it was chaos. A mess. The ten-by-ten-foot room was literally covered in paper. Pages from Sam’s memos and Virginia Vacario’s transcripts were tacked to the walls and Scotch-taped willy-nilly to the desk, the credenza, and the bookcases. Charlotte had emphasized certain paragraphs with pink, blue, yellow, and green highlighters. Specific sentences were underlined in red, green, and black ink.

  Wide-eyed, she looked up from her desk. She took in Sam’s befuddled expression, frowned, and said, “Go away, Sam.”

  Obediently, he slipped out of the house, climbed into his car, and drove north over the bridge to Port Charlotte. He found a men’s clothing store where he paid cash for shorts, sandals, two short-sleeved shirts, and two sets of underwear. He changed clothes in the store’s dressing room, then drove over to a small mall called Fisherman’s Village, found a friendly bar with tables overlooking the water, and downed a fried grouper sandwich and two beers while he checked the Wall Street Journal USA Today, and the Tampa and Miami papers to see if he could find any ripples. There were none.

  He was back at Charlotte’s at four. She was asleep, the door to her bedroom closed. He checked the thermostat. It read eighty-five degrees. The cats were stretched out on the sofa. A note on the kitchen table directed him to buy a paper shredder. Sam checked the phone book, called the closest Office Depot, climbed into his car, perused the maps, then drove to a mile-long mall in Punta Gorda, where he paid cash for a fifteen-sheet, crosscut model. Back at Charlotte’s, he unpacked the shredder and left it like an offering in front of her office door. Then he retreated to the Florida room, turned the ceiling fan to high, switched the TV on, and flipped back and forth between CNN and the Fox News Channel for an hour, searching for news from Washington. He was relieved to hear no mention of Rand Arthur, U.S. Capitol policemen, or himself. Good: at least Rand was playing everything close to the vest.

  Charlotte awoke at five-thirty. She smiled when she saw the shredder, then fixed them gin and tonics, but took hers into the cramped office and shut the door. Sam took a peek in the fridge and decided he’d eat dinner out.

  It rained all night. When Sam went running at five the following morning, the humidity was so palpable he felt as if he were breathing liquid oxygen. She was already up by the time he left—he could see the light under the office door. She must have heard him tiptoeing in the hallway because she called out, loudly, “Go away, Sam.”

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2002

  10:00 A.M. Sam climbed into his rental car and drove sixty miles east, to the town of Moore Haven, on the shore of Lake Okeechobee. There, he used the cell phone with a New York City number and dialed his voice mailbox. There were three messages from Ginny Vacario, one from John Forbes, and two from O’Neill.

  He dialed O’Neill’s number, using the cell phone with the Washington, D.C., number.

  “O’Neill.”

  “Cyrus N. PRINGLE.”

  “Cyrus, thank God. I’ve been frantic. Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay, Michael. What’s up?”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in the parking lot at the Cosmos.”

  There was a slight pause. Then: “If that’s the case, get your behind over to my office immediately. We have to work things out.”

  “Work what out?”

  “With the senator. Smooth things over. Rand Arthur is furious. He thinks you’re working for the Russians—that you cooked up the whole Moscow episode so you could receive instructions from the SVR. I told him he’s totally misconstrued events, but he wants to get the police involved. Issue a BOLO.49 Have you arrested.”

  “He can’t do that.”

  “Oh, yes he can under the Patriot Act, Sam. And he’s fixated. He wants your scalp on his tent pole. I’ve managed to convince him not to do anything for the moment—nasty publicity and all that might affect his presidential possibilities—but I have to tell you he’s being very pigheaded and he could act unilaterally at any second.”

  Rand Arthur had already gotten the police involved—and not in the way Michael O’Neill was describing the situation either. But Sam said nothing.

  “What’s your suggestion, Michael?”

  “Come clean, Sam. We both know why you met with GTREQUIRE, which was to press him about Edward Lee Howard. I’ll set everything up. You’ll meet face-to-face—not up at the Capitol, but in a safe venue. Private. You tell Rand what we were looking for in Moscow. I’ll back you up.”

  The thought of a private meeting with Rand Arthur made Sam very nervous—even with O’Neill in attendance. “I’ll think about it. I’ll call you when I’ve made a decision.”

  “I’d prefer you come see me now so we can work this out.”

  “Impossible at the moment. Will you be around over the holidays?”

  “I’m backed up at the office, and the senator’s got me running in circles. I’m going nowhere.”

  Sam said, “Hmm.” Then he said, “Thanks, Michael. I’ll be in touch.”

  O’Neill’s voice was taut. “Cyrus—”

  “Yes?”

  “You be careful out there, Cyrus. Watch your back. This is turning into a nasty game.”

  How right he was. “I will, SAMGRASS. Bye.”

  WHEN SAM RETURNED to the house just after noon, Charlotte greeted him at the door. Her face was flushed and radiant. She looked ten years younger. As she handed him a mug of coffee, he caught the whiff of perfume on her wrist.

  Sam said “Spaciba” and took the coffee with a smile: the mug was emblazoned with the star, sword, and shield of the KGB.

  Charlotte fingered the top button of her housecoat. “Look at what Charlotte has for you, Sam.”

  He glanced at the kitchen table. Four large sheets of paper lay on the mottled green Formica. Each sheet held a neatly drawn diagram. Sam set the coffee down, went to the linen closet, pulled a towel out, and mopped the sweat off his face, neck, arms, and legs. Then he took a sip of the coffee and sat at the table.

  Charlotte set the diagrams one atop the other. She pointed to the first one, which was made up of triangles, squares, diamonds, parallelograms, and pentagons, each of them numbered separately, dated, and linked to the next symbol by an arrow.

  “This is a time-even
t chart,” she said. “We begin—that’s the triangle in the upper-left-hand corner—with Edward Lee Howard’s defection in 1985. We end—that’s the triangle in the bottom-right-hand corner—with the attempt on your life last Wednesday morning. Each major event is depicted with either a square or another symbol. Minor transitions or shifts are depicted by circles. And tectonic transitions are triangles. The idea, Sam, is to lay out a chronological record of what’s gone on. It gives us a clear picture of the order in which things happened. And the chart draws our attention to pattern shifts, changes in modus operandi, or—and this is most important—anomalies.”

  She slid the second chart on top of the pile. It was a grid set into a right triangle, with the right angle at the bottom-left-hand side of the sheet. “This is an association matrix. Everyone who appears in the paper you gave me is listed here. What I’ve done is chart their associations. The matrix allows us to see who knows whom—those are the black dots—or who we suspect knows whom, which are the black circles.”

  The third chart looked to Sam like a timetable, or a stock chart. It was a square grid. The left-hand side charted each of the players. At the bottom, Charlotte had annotated a series of activities, events, organizations, locations, and addresses. “This,” she explained, “you’ve probably seen before. It’s an activities matrix. Sometimes, if we can pinpoint who did what, as well as when and where they did it, we can discover an association we hadn’t been able to identify before. It’s also good for discerning anomalies.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, you told me Semonov’s polygraph was done by O’Neill. Your notes said you hadn’t known that fact before. If you only looked at the association matrix, you’d see that O’Neill and Semonov had a connection. They did—because O’Neill was with you when you first spotted Alexei Alexandrovich Semonov, aka GTREQUIRE. But here, you can see that O’Neill and REQUIRE intersect twice, not once.” She drew her finger along the chart to show Sam where O’Neill’s dots and Semonov’s lined up in the column that readPARIS SAFE HOUSE 1.

  Sam nodded. “And chart number four?”

  “That’s the one that took Charlotte the most time,” she said. “It’s what we used to call a link diagram. It was Jim Angleton’s idea—he’d used it at OSS. Jim was an English professor at heart. He should have been an Oxford don. He used to make his counterintelligence acolytes diagram sentences so as to discern language patterns. Then he got the idea of using the same technique we used for dissecting sentences to create a diagram that analyzed relationships.”

  Charlotte sipped at her coffee. “I’ll tell you a secret. In the early 1960s Angleton showed one of his link diagrams to J. Edgar Hoover and the little so-and-so stole it to use for his congressional briefings on Communist infiltration and organized crime. Jim was outraged because Hoover took credit for developing link diagrams. Hoover actually told President Kennedy it was his idea.” Charlotte’s eyes flashed angrily. “Hoover had very little style. No panache at all. Behind the three-piece suits and the fedoras he was an intensely plebeian individual.” She paused, lolling her head and watching the slow-moving ceiling fan. Sam could hear the wheezing of the compressor outside. Charlotte sighed deeply. “But Jim Angleton—now, he was a poet, Sam. Did you know he was a friend of T.S.Eliot’s?”

  “I’d never heard that.”

  She nodded, a faraway look in her eyes. Sam thought she was drifting off. But then she focused on him. “You’ve got a mess on your hands, Sam. Rotten apples.”

  “I know.”

  “They’ve been playing you. Disinformation. Active measures. Black information, Sam.”

  “I know that, too. I just can’t figure out how.”

  “You forgot about EMSI.”

  “Emcee?”

  “E-M-S-l: Ego, Money, Sex, Ideology. Moscow Center’s classic vulnerability recruitment acronym.” She looked at him disapprovingly. “You let your ego get in the way, Sam. That’s how they hooked you.”

  “Hooked me? Impossible. I’m waterproof, Charlotte—imperméable.”

  “You? You were perméable from the very beginning. Like the way Edward Lee Howard brought up the subject of Pavel Baranov. He hooked you with the words—he was smart enough to understand the name Baranov would churn your emotions. Then he talked about SCEPTRE and SCARAB— but he never really comprehended what the hell he was saying. Oh, Howard was a fool. A drunk—and Klimov knew that. Klimov, Sam. Klimov is behind this.”

  “Klimov”

  “Howard was Klimov’s pawn. His jack-in-the-box. Klimov made sure that Howard would pop up in Washington. But he was a diversion. And by the time you figured out what he was, your attention would have been distracted long enough for Klimov’s plan to work. But Howard slipped up—badly. He told you what Primakov did at the State Department. That was a jewel, Sam, except you didn’t realize it at the time. And when Howard got spooked and fled to Moscow, Klimov killed him to keep him from screwing up any more.”

  “Screwed up what, Charlotte?”

  “You were right all along, Sam. There are traitors at the highest levels of government. We’re porous, Sam. We’ve been porous for years.” Charlotte’s eyes glistened. “It’s in the Russian character to think long-term. We in the West tend to have short memories. But not Moscow. This began in Paris, Sam, when Klimov was Rezident, and you and SAMGRASS went out trolling.”

  “But—”

  Her expression changed. Her tone turned reproachful. “You have been manipulated, Sam. They identified your pattern.”

  Sam was indignant. “I have never operated by pattern, Charlotte. I know better.”

  But she didn’t give an inch. “Fact, Sam: in Paris you fought to get out of the office so you could get back on the street. You battled the powers that be at Langley to recruit GTREQUIRE. Fact: in Moscow, you repeated the same pattern when you came upon Baranov. Fact: just a month or so ago, when you saw Edward Lee Howard at Senator Arthur’s, you became so excited about being back in the game you for got to think like a case officer.” She looked at him, her arms crossed. “Well?”

  He looked at her. Goddammit, she was right.

  “And about Baranov—”

  “Yes?” Sam wanted to hear the confirmation from someone else.

  “An anomaly.”

  “What?” She was wrong. Baranov was the key.

  “Baranov was a diversion, too. Sam. I’m convinced Klimov had him killed—Putin’s way of getting you out of Moscow. You’d been effective there, Sam, and were a thorn in Putin’s side. But there are other possibilities that cannot be discounted. Perhaps Baranov was in bed with the Mafiya—Russian generals don’t make enough to buy Rolex President watches. Maybe it was part of a preemptive strike by Yeltsin against General Lebed. But Baranov wasn’t the point. You were. Once you’d been yanked back to Washington, you’d been neutralized.”

  “Charlotte, that’s not true—”

  “It is, Sam,” she interrupted. “You were fixated. Looking for traitors. The opposition knew that. Putin, Krassilnikov, Klimov—they all knew how you’d react.”

  “C’mon.”

  “You’re not listening to me, Sam. Focus. It began in Paris. Don’t you think Klimov had his eye on you when you were deputy chief? You were playing games, Sam. Out of the office. Trolling. Klimov was the KGB Rezident. He knew damn sure that deputy chiefs don’t troll; they keep the accounts. They make the assignments. You attracted his attention, Sam. So he had a psychological profile done. He’s a snake, Sam. A viper. A cobra. He was told how you’d act under certain provocations. He knew your capabilities and was able to gauge your intentions. Which means he’d made you vulnerable—perméable. Klimov passed all that information to Moscow Center. You know about Moscow Center, Sam. They were never rushed. They thought long-term. Still do. And so, they waited until the opportunity arose—when you recruited Pavel Baranov in Moscow—and then, like good intelligence people do, they decided to make use of you.

  “It’s all here.” She tapped the link diagram. “Look,
Sam, despite its institutional inflexibility, KGB was a world-class service. They made good use of walk-ins. They were adept at false flag recruitments. And God knows they knew how to exploit weakness. This new Russian service is no different—except these days, they get help from the Romanoffs at Langley.”

  Sam peered down at the diagram. Dammit, he’d screwed things up royally. How the hell had he missed the connections?

  Charlotte must have read his mind. “The key is analysis.”

  “I analyzed everything, Charlotte.”

  She shook her head. “No, Sam. You’d reached your verdict before you began your analysis.”

  “Charlotte—”

  “Sam, you didn’t do anything wrong. You just aren’t an analyst. You began to analyze the evidence intuitively sensing that Edward Lee Howard had killed Baranov.” She looked over at him. “Be honest, Sam.”

  He had to admit she was right—and he said so.

  “It’s a natural instinct. You focus on the substance of the problem—the evidence, the pros and the cons, the empirical conclusions—and the analysis all begins to fall into place. It makes perfect sense. It forms a logical pattern.”

  He thought about what she was saying and nodded. “That’s right.”

  “You sensed a pattern from the very beginning, Sam. It was just that you couldn’t figure out what the pattern was.”

  “Absolutely.”

  She shook her head. “The problem, Sam, was that there is no pattern to these events. Some of them were meant to be utterly nonrelated, in order to confuse you. Moscow Center performed something similar to a magician’s sleight-of-hand trick. Klimov drew you off in one direction—using Baranov, or Howard—then acted while your attention was diverted.”

  Sam thought about what she’d just said. And dammit, she was right. He’d been played.

  “There’s another side of this,” Charlotte said, her tone slightly rebuking. “I don’t think you read the reporting as closely as you might have.”

  Sam drew back. “I read it all.”