Mounting Fears

by Stuart Woods

  “Barbara Ortega, who was Stanton’s chief of staff the last two years he was governor. This is not the hottest tip, it’s supposition based on proximity: she was there, so given Stanton’s reputation for libido, he must have fucked her.”

  “That would be a legitimate basis on which to proceed,” Willie said, “if we had six more months to nail it down, but we don’t. Is this Ortega traveling with Stanton on the campaign? A threesome with Stanton and Wharton would be a nice thing.”

  “No, she’s just been appointed head of the Criminal Division at the Justice Department. She’s been living at the Ritz-Carlton for a couple of weeks, and she bought a house in Georgetown. They were seen together in Sacramento at the swearing-in ceremony for Mike Rivera, Stanton’s successor, but not before or after. They can’t be put together at any other time since Stanton got the vice-presidential nod.”

  Gaynes sat back in his chair and gazed out his window toward the Potomac River. “Tell you what,” he said, “get recordings of the voices of all three women and have our guy compare them to the woman’s voice on the Stanton recordings.”

  “Great idea!” Pickett said, sarcastically. “Any ideas on how I can manage that?”

  “What do you think I’m paying you the big bucks for, Nelson? Do I have to do all the thinking around here? Now, get out and get on it! We’re short of time!”

  TODD BACON SAT on a bar stool at El Conquistador and sipped his third margarita. It was his third evening on the hunt, and he was with a code clerk from the embassy, a dish named Rita. He’d had his eye on her for a while, and now he had a professional reason for taking her out.

  “When are we going to get some dinner?” Rita asked plaintively. “I’m going to topple off this bar stool in a minute.”

  “Just a sec,” Bacon said. An elderly man with longish white hair and a Vandyke beard had just entered the bar, and Bacon’s pulse was up at least ten points. The man was the right size and age, and the hair and beard were a good disguise. He rearranged himself on the bar stool so that Rita was between him and the mark. That way he could seem to be looking at Rita when he was actually looking past her.

  “Todd, I’m not kidding,” Rita said. “I’m drunk and hungry, and I’m going to faint any minute.”

  Bacon waved at the bartender. “Can we dine at the bar, señor?”

  The bartender brought two menus.

  “Can’t we get a table?” Rita asked.

  “Rita, baby, I’m working, here; you know about work, don’t you? Order anything you like, and order one for me, too.”

  “You spooks are all alike,” Rita said. “Work, work, work, day and night.”

  Bacon ran a hand up her skirt and found, to his surprise and delight, that she was wearing stockings and a garter belt, instead of panty hose. “Hey, hey,” he said.

  “Not now,” she replied. “Not until I’ve had some food.” She waved the bartender over and held up two fingers. “Dos specialitees,” she said in mangled Spanish, “and a bottle of vino blanco primo.”

  Bacon snapped his attention back to the man at the bar to check out the left ear. Unfortunately, the man’s hair covered the ear entirely. Just what the mark would do, Bacon thought.

  Plates of guacamole appeared before them on the bar, and Rita dug in with a vengeance. “Oh, God, that’s good,” she said. “I might make it through the evening.”

  Bacon tried it, and she was right; it was good, and he was very hungry, too. The man with the beard was saying something to the bartender, and he strained to hear it. It was English, but that was the best he could do. Bacon was beginning to believe with all his heart that the man he was looking at was his mark. The man looked like a cross between Colonel Sanders and Grandpa on The Waltons. He had seen the reruns on Nickelodeon when he was a kid.

  “So Toddy,” Rita said, “where’d you go to school?”

  “Alabama,” Bacon replied absently.

  “Joe Namath Alabama?”

  “One and the same.”

  “So you’re southern white trash, or what?”

  Bacon fixed her with his gaze. “Southern white aristocracy,” he replied, “not that you’d know the difference.” The man at the bar reached under his hair with a finger and scratched at his ear, but there wasn’t time for Bacon to fix on it before it was covered with hair again.

  “You mean your people owned slaves and all that?”

  “Lots of slaves and lots of all that,” Bacon replied.

  “So they were rich?”

  “They were, for a time. They had to get it all back after the war.”

  “The Civil War?”

  “The War Between the States,” Bacon replied, “or the Struggle for Southern Independence, take your pick.”

  Then something awful happened. A pretty blonde in her thirties came into the bar and sat down beside the man with the beard, giving him a peck on the cheek. “Hey, sweetheart,” she said.

  “This is Mrs. Williams,” the man said to the bartender. “We were married just before we left New York.”

  Mrs. Williams shook hands with the bartender.

  “Is this your first time in Panama, señor?” the bartender asked.

  “It certainly is,” Williams replied. “We’re taking a private tour of the canal tomorrow.”

  “I hope your rooms are satisfactory.”

  “Yes, we have a real nice suite on the top floor.”

  Bacon’s heart sank. “Shit,” he said under his breath.

  “What?” Rita asked.

  “Never mind, baby,” Bacon said. “You just eat your dinner, then we’ll go back to my place.” At least the evening wouldn’t be a total loss.

  “Deal,” Rita replied, mopping up the last of the guacamole and receiving a plate of some sort of stew.

  “What the hell,” Bacon said, starting on his stew. “You win some, you lose some. There’s always tomorrow.”

  TEDDY FAY WATCHED the young couple at the bar from his table. “Mrs. Williams” was an American hooker he occasionally spent a night with in a hotel room, and he was looking forward to this night.

  Teddy noticed the bartender head for the men’s room. He excused himself from the table, walked over to the bar, to where the credit card machine was kept, and quickly fingered through the pile of receipts. Bacon—that was one of the names on the embassy’s website. Bacon belonged to Owen Masters.

  Teddy rejoined his date, but his mind was elsewhere.

  47

  TEDDY FAY LAY IN BED, SPENT BUT WIDE AWAKE, WATCHING CNN WHILE THE GIRL snored lightly beside him. He was profoundly disturbed by what he was seeing.

  A tall, handsome black man in a gorgeously cut suit was speaking to a luncheon crowd of black businessmen in Birmingham, Alabama.

  “It is time,” the man was saying, “that we put America and the administration of President Lee on notice that gradual is not fast enough, that transition has gone on too long, that half a dozen black CEOs of large corporations is not full integration into the business life of this country, that new legislation is essential for the reinstatement of programs to help young black citizens participate fully in education and careers . . .”

  CNN cut back to its correspondent. “There you hear the Reverend Henry King Johnson making an appeal to an influential and wealthy audience for campaign contributions. Meanwhile, at the White House, President Lee and his advisors are poring over opinion polls that have to be shocking to them, polls that for the first time actually put the president behind Bill Spanner in the election race and all because the Reverend Johnson is siphoning off enough black votes to make a loss for Will Lee a very real possibility.”

  Teddy’s heart was pounding; it was time to go home. He switched off the TV, got out of bed, and got dressed. He left some money on the dresser for the girl, let himself out of the suite, and headed to his little apartment. There, he began by putting everything he no longer needed into a trash bag and leaving it outside for pickup. Then he packed some clothes and all the equipment needed to maintai
n his identities and disguises. From among his few weapons he chose the very small Colt Mustang .380 and slipped the holster onto his belt. He put the screw-on silencer and an extra magazine into his coat pocket and pulled a baseball cap on over his wig.

  He packed his goods into the old station wagon he owned and drove them to the little airport outside the city where he kept his Cessna 182 RG stored in a ramshackle hangar. He packed the airplane carefully, then rolled the airplane out with the tow bar and over to the fuel pumps, where he filled the wing tanks and the ferry tank in the rear seat that doubled the airplane’s range. Then he returned the aircraft to its hangar, closed it, and drove back to Panama City.

  He parked the station wagon near where he kept the scooter and wiped it clean of fingerprints, then he started the scooter and drove to within a few blocks of the American embassy. The sun was well up now, and rush hour had started. He parked near the embassy and looked for transportation to steal. He found an elderly but well-kept Honda light motorcycle and spent no more than a minute getting it started. That done, he drove to within fifty yards of the embassy and pulled into a side street that allowed him a view of the area.

  He had not been there for more than half an hour when he saw young Bacon get out of a taxi and start up the front steps of the embassy. Teddy held his position. For sentimental reasons, he did not wish to harm a bright young man just starting his career with the Agency.

  He waited another forty-five minutes before he saw Owen Masters get out of a cab across the street from the embassy and start picking his way through traffic. Teddy started the motorcycle.

  Masters paused on the center island of the wide street to wait for the light to change, and, when it did, he started across. In company with half a dozen others, Teddy pulled into traffic, and, when the flow stopped for the light, he continued through the crosswalk, which took him within six feet of Masters’s back. He stopped. “Hello, Owen,” he called out.

  Masters turned and looked behind him. With his left hand, Teddy pulled off the Vandyke beard, and he saw recognition in Masters’s eyes. Teddy shot him once, in the middle of the forehead, then gunned the motorcycle and raced off.

  He made his way back to near where he had parked his scooter in an alley; abandoned the motorcycle; then stripped off his coat, wig, and baseball cap, and put on a windbreaker and a different cap that he kept in the scooter’s storage compartment. In a moment, he was on his way.

  He drove by the embassy again and was made to turn off the main drag by the police, but he got a good look at the scene: Owen crumpled in the street, while two policemen tried to keep the curious crowd away from the corpse while they waited for backup.

  An hour later, Teddy put the scooter inside the hangar, rolled the airplane out, and closed the door. He did a cursory preflight inspection, then got the engine started. He taxied to the end of the three-thousand-foot grass strip, did a brief run-up of the engine, and ran through his takeoff checklist, then he shoved the throttle in all the way and began to roll down the runway.

  He needed nearly two-thirds of the airstrip to gain enough airspeed to rotate, and when he did, the Cessna climbed strongly. He flew north at five hundred feet to stay below canal radar and held that altitude until he had cleared Panamanian waters, then he climbed to eight thousand feet, leaned the engine, and settled in for the long flight. His fuel totalizer told him he had plenty for his plan, and he had a thirty-knot tailwind, to boot.

  Four hours later he landed on a small strip in the Cayman Islands and took a taxi into George Town, where he visited his bank and replenished his funds. He also turned in his credit card and received a new one, usable anywhere and paid directly from his Cayman account; it was untraceable. He had some lunch, then returned to the airport, fueled his airplane, and filed a flight plan for Key West, using a false tail number.

  He took off and flew north, contacting Cuban air traffic control for clearance to cross the island nation, which was granted. With Key West in sight he switched off his transponder, descended to wave top height, and flew northeast to Marathon, where he began a climb and contacted Key West approach. “November one, two, three Tango Foxtrot, off Marathon, VFR to Sarasota,” he told the controller.

  Now he was just another American light-aircraft pilot, wending his way home. Well after dark, he landed at Covington, a small-town airport east of Atlanta. He had some dinner at a local restaurant, then checked into a motel and fell gratefully into a deep sleep.

  Tomorrow he would begin his research on the Reverend Henry King Johnson and his movements, and within a few days, he was confident, their paths would cross.

  48

  TODD BACON STOOD AT THE WINDOW OF THE OFFICE HE SHARED WITH THREE OTHER young CIA officers, sipping coffee and looking idly into the busy street below. He was, as usual, the first one in, so he had time to drink his coffee and take a look at the International Herald Tribune.

  As Todd watched, he saw Owen Masters get out of a taxi on the opposite side of the street and start across. Owen limped a little and seemed older than his years, Todd thought. Would he end up like the older man? Station chief in some backwater, serving out his time? The traffic light changed, and Owen started across the street.

  Todd was about to turn away when he saw something moving fast between the cars stopped for the light. He watched, thinking the motorcycle was going to plow into the crossing pedestrians, then it suddenly stopped in the middle of the crosswalk. Owen stopped, turned, and looked back. Then the man on the motorcycle held out his arm, and there was a wisp of smoke. Owen went down, and the motorcycle moved on.

  Todd was horrified, but he had the presence of mind to watch the motorcycle, and he recognized the suit and the longish gray hair protruding from a baseball cap. It was the man from the night before.

  He looked back at Owen. A police officer was bending over him, then putting fingers to his throat and shaking his head, while another officer waved the crowd away. Todd set down his coffee cup, went to his desk, and retrieved a typed list of telephone numbers. He found the number he wanted next to the words “Pizza delivery,” and he dialed it, while trying to control his breathing.

  LANCE CABOT WAS GOING OVER some equipment orders with Holly Barker when his phone rang and his direct field line started flashing. “Hold on,” he said to Holly and picked up the phone. “Yes?”

  “Sir, it’s . . . I’m sorry, scramble.”

  Lance pushed a button. “Scrambled.”

  “Sir, it’s Todd Bacon, assistant station chief in Panama City.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m in my office. I saw Owen Masters get out of a cab and start across the street. A man on a motorcycle shot him in the head, then made his escape. Owen is dead.”

  Lance thought he was going to throw up. “Is Owen’s office secure?” he was finally able to ask.

  “Yes, sir. He never arrived for work to open it.”

  “Hold on.” Lance turned to his computer and pulled up a secure file. “Write this down: The combination to the lock on Owen’s door is 66759, the combination to his safe is 797461. Did you get that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re acting station chief until somebody can relieve you. Do not, repeat, not call the police. They will contact the ambassador’s office and be given Owen’s cover story. You are not to speak to them unless they seek you out, which is unlikely. If they do, stick to the cover story, understand?”

  “I understand, sir, but there’s something you ought to know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I know the man who shot Owen.”

  “What?”

  “Owen gave me an assignment to find him, and I found him last night, but I didn’t recognize him, since he was disguised.”

  “What is the man’s name?”

  “Owen didn’t tell me, he just showed me a photograph and gave me a lecture about how dangerous the man was. I saw him in a hotel bar last night and overheard his conversation with the bartender. He was with a younger
woman he introduced as his wife. He said they were from New York and were taking a private tour of the canal tomorrow—today, rather—and I bought it. Do you know who this man is, sir?”

  Lance ignored the question. “Did Owen assign anyone else to this operation?”

  “No, sir, just me.”

  “You are not to tell any of your Agency colleagues or anyone else at the embassy or the Agency of your conversation with Owen or your assignment, is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir, if you say so.”

  “How long ago did this happen?”

  “About one minute before I called you. I want to track down this man and kill him.”

  “You are not to do that, Todd. The man is already on the way out of the country, and looking for him would be a waste of time. He’ll be somewhere in South America by lunchtime.”

  “But I know what he looks like.”

  “You know what his disguise looks like, and he has already changed that.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do?”

  “Hang up, go to the ambassador ’s office, and tell him personally what you saw happen. Tell him your instructions are to stick to Owen’s cover story. Tell him that this incident will be dealt with from Langley and to direct police inquiries to me through the State Department switchboard. Have you got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then I want you to go back to work, doing what you would ordinarily be doing. When you get into Owen’s office, I want you to search his desk and file cabinets for any reference to the assignment he gave you. If you find anything referring to it, I want you to scan it and e-mail it to me, then shred any documents and, particularly, the photograph of the man. We already have that.”

  “Who is he, sir?”

  “Whoever he says he is,” Lance said, then hung up.

  Holly looked at Lance expectantly but didn’t ask any questions.

  “Teddy Fay has killed Owen Masters in Panama City,” Lance said.

  “Oh, shit,” Holly said.