HUNTER: A Thriller (A Dylan Hunter Thriller)
Page 25
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 left 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 tak
e 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 over 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.”
It baffled her. “How does a man like that go rogue and become an assassin?”
“That brings us back to motive,” Garrett answered, sitting down again. “Matt Malone had every reason in the world to hate and want to kill James Muller. You see, Malone was one of the officers that Muller betrayed to Moscow.”
“Oh!”
“So that’s motive. He also had opportunity—because he knew about the safe house. In fact, he’d been there himself once, to conduct an interrogation.”
Kessler said, “And also believe us when we say: He had the means. Many times, he had proven in the field just how lethal he could be.”
She paused, turning it over in her mind. “Okay. I believe you. Still, I’m having trouble getting my head around this. His motivation, mainly. Sure, Muller blew his cover, and he was pissed off. But assassination? That seems a bit over the top.”
The two men exchanged glances.
“It’s more than just being blown,” Garrett said. “After Muller tipped off the Russians, they tried to assassinate Malone. That was almost three years ago, March. He was in Afghanistan as an interrogator attached to a black ops team. The Russkies lured him into an ambush. They had a bomb waiting. Malone barely survived it. His face in particular was a mess. We flew him back to Walter Reed. He underwent extensive reconstructive plastic surgery.” He looked at her, said quietly: “Your late friend, Dr. Copeland, did the surgery himself.”
“Arthur?” she said. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. He was the best.”
“Imagine what that must have been like, Annie,” Kessler said. “Sure, we all take risks in this business. It’s part of the game. But you don’t expect to be betrayed by one of your own. You don’t expect to have your career, let alone your appearance, annihilated by a traitor.”
She stared at the face in the photo, hating the memory of James Muller even more. “So you’re sure he did it.”
“Malone is a stellar marksman. It all fits. No other explanation does.”
“We had it all wrong, then,” she said, sighing. She turned the photo around to face them. “You say he had plastic surgery, but this is an old shot. What does he look like now?”
Garrett shrugged. “I’d like to show you something more recent, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“There isn’t one.”
“But don’t we—”
“Not for him.” He leaned back and propped a foot against the edge of the coffee table. “There’s no file, either. We have nothing on him. Not even fingerprints. I’ll explain in a moment. In fact, it’s sheer dumb luck we have this single photo. It shouldn’t exist. It was taken surreptitiously by a Special Ops Group team member in Afghanistan. To impress his girlfriend, he admitted later. We canned the idiot for that; but he should consider himself lucky, because if Malone had known, he would’ve probably killed him. Anyway, it wound up at the bottom of the SOG guy’s file, and it turned up only after we began searching for anything that could help us find Malone.”
“Find him?”
THIRTY-TWO
ALLEGHENY NATIONAL FOREST
TIONESTA, PENNSYLVANIA
Thirty-one Months Earlier—May 15, 3:45 p.m.
“Who are you?”
The lips on the stranger’s face in the bathroom mirror moved, perfectly in synch with his own.
He stood frozen in place, unable to make sense of what he was seeing.
For weeks, he thought he’d accepted what had happened to him. With his usual cockiness, he figured he was prepared. In fact, he’d been eager for this moment.
But that was before he stared into this mirror—into the haunted eyes of a pale, swollen, bruised, unshaven face that he no longer recognized.
He exhaled loudly, suddenly aware that he’d been holding his breath. He shook his head—but stopped when the stranger shook his, too.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded, louder.
The stranger’s lips had moved again. And this time the voice registered. Deeper than his own. Not quite raspy, but huskier. The same trauma that had done this to his face had done something funny to his vocal cords, too.
He stopped.
His face? His voice?
His heart was pounding and his head began to spin. He had to look away. He lurched to the bathroom doorway and leaned against the frame, stomach churning, fighting down the bitter taste rising in his throat.
The rustic living room swam before him dimly, gloomy from the towering oaks and pines that cloaked the cabin in perpetual shadow.
He noticed his duffle bag on the bare planks of the floor, where he’d dropped it a few minutes ago. Nearby, his worn leather jacket, draped over the back of an old wooden chair.
His eyes drifted to the double-barreled Mossberg he’d propped near the screen door that led onto the front porch.