A Game for Assassins (The Redaction Chronicles Book 1)

by James Quinn

  * * *

  “Galerkin was one of the shrewdest operators who approached us in the Helsinki Station. When he got in touch, he definitely had his capitalist businessman's head on.”

  Troy Dempsey was drinking excellent coffee in the sixth floor offices of Renner & Stone Law of Chicago. His host was Joe Stanhope, junior partner and former CIA intelligence officer.

  “Oh, don't get me wrong, he was a pain in the ass to deal with on a day-by-day basis. He was very high maintenance and if he'd lived, I could have imagined the debriefing team stateside getting a bit rough with him,” continued Stanhope. “But the stuff that he was going to bring us was going to be top drawer, or so he insinuated.”

  “Top drawer how?” asked Dempsey.

  Stanhope lifted his feet down from his desk, where he'd been laconically relaxing. He was young and smartly dressed; his only concession to a relaxed look was removing his jacket in his office. Stanhope, after a successful five years with the Agency, had decided to return to his first love, being a lawyer. The offers, the prospects and the money were just too good to ignore, especially after the way he and his colleagues working on the Galerkin case had been treated.

  “Oh, we had snippets of the rundown of the local KGB Stations in the geographical area, which was nice, some material relating to the intentions of the Politburo towards the Scandinavian countries. Good stuff, just enough to whet the appetite and establish Galerkin's bona fides. Then of course, there was the shooting in Poland. You know about that, of course you do, otherwise you wouldn't be here. That's when Higgins got involved.”

  Dempsey smiled a 'gosh-shucks' kind of grin, as if he'd been found out. “Can I just ask, Joe, prior to the ADP being involved, how was the Galerkin case going?”

  Stanhope nodded. “Just fine, perfect in fact. We were doing everything right running our agent and Galerkin was doing everything right in getting the best deal for himself that he could. Then he started getting the shivers and the nerves kicked in. He claimed people were watching him, his own people, and they were ready to grab him.”

  “And were they?”

  “Who knows? Nobody knows for sure, but we hadn't seen anything of the kind. That's when the talk at our meetings turned from Galerkin being an agent in place, to wanting to defect overnight.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “We stalled him, like we do with all defectors. Buy some time and give him the usual excuses; it will take some time, red tape, legal considerations. Anything to keep him hanging on in there for a while longer.”

  Dempsey had done similar with his own agents in the past, part bullying and part coercing them to remain active rather than wanting to jump ship because they'd gotten a little spooked.

  “Then he started to take the information he claimed to have to another level. Big stuff, he said. That's when he began to talk about his knowledge of the shooting in Poland, plus one or two other pieces of intelligence that he thought would tempt us. We cabled Langley and asked for guidance.” Stanhope told the rest at a staccato rapid fire pace. A cable back from Langley, someone from the Plans Directorate had an interest in the case, partly the shooting in Poland investigation and partly to see if Galerkin was worth taking seriously.

  “The whole team was cock-a-hoop. Helsinki isn't exactly at the sharp end and yet we'd managed to get ourselves a genuine KGB defector who wanted to come over to us and who had a stash of hard information that he was going to bring out. Roll out the gravy train, or so we thought.”

  “Then what happened?” asked Dempsey. Wellings had already briefed him on what was in the files before he had stepped onto the flight to Chicago, but he wanted it direct from the former case officer's mouth.

  Stanhope frowned. “What happened was that we gave Higgins one session with our guy, and the next thing we know, he's pulled the plug on the operation. We got a cable back from Higgins at Langley, saying that our guy was a fraud and we were to drop him like yesterday. We were pissed at that. So, Grimes, the Chief of Station, gets on the war drums and sends back a terse reply.”

  “Obviously it didn't work.”

  “No. Grimes was just letting off steam, we all were, but he was pro enough to know not to screw with headquarters once they'd issued a directive. Langley told us to watch our mouths and toe the party line. So we did what any team of CIA spies do when the going gets tough. We went out and got drunk. We all had a hell of a hangover the next day.”

  Dempsey smiled. He liked Stanhope, would have probably enjoyed working with him.

  “It was a moot point, anyway. We'd been warned off by Higgins or the DCI or Langley as a whole and then we got the news.”

  “What news?” said Dempsey, although he imagined he knew what the other man meant.

  “Galerkin had been found dead. Murdered in the same hotel room where we'd had our last meeting. FUBAR,” said Stanhope grimly.

  Dempsey stood and looked out at the mid-afternoon sun bathing the streets of Chicago. “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition, indeed.”

  “After that, well, there really wasn't much to do. All the intel that Galerkin had passed to us was pretty much ditched. The analysis back from Langley was that it had all been fraudulent or scraps anyway, so no big deal. The fact that Galerkin had been killed just added more weight to the argument that he was probably a bit of a flake and unreliable. We always assumed the KGB thugs had gotten him.”

  “Did you take it any further with Langley, about Galerkin being the real deal?” said Dempsey.

  “I tried several times, but my messages were either ignored or just brushed aside as me being resentful. Finally, I got a warning from Higgins to stop. It was the usual series of veiled threats; bad for business, bad for my promotion, bad for Agency morale, so just shut up, Stanhope!”

  “Maybe he was right. Maybe Galerkin was a bad egg.” Dempsey let the thought hang in the air for a second or two before continuing. “Unless you have something else that could back up your hypothesis.”

  Stanhope twirled his office chair around and glared at Dempsey. “Can I just tell you something, Troy? I used to love the Agency. The people, the operations, the challenges. I felt at home there. I would have taken a bullet for any of the guys I worked with.” He stood and walked across to Dempsey, so they were face-to-face. “But what I can't stand, is the fact that in those last few months, I spent more time fighting my own senior officers than I did the Russians. That kind of sticks in my throat.”

  Dempsey understood perfectly. “So I'll ask again, Joe. Is there anything else, or is this all just sour grapes on your part?”

  Stanhope shook his head. Dempsey thought this was the way he would behave when he was giving a closing speech in court. “I don't work for the Agency anymore, Troy. I'm out and all the better for it. The most I have to deal with in the back-stabbing business is having the senior partners not invite me to all the client parties and functions, but that's nothing compared to having a bunch of CIA stiffs try and screw me over. Especially when I know that something doesn't add up. Besides, if I do give you what I think… sorry, know… then I don't want the strong arm of the CIA weighing down on me.”

  “Look, if you're concerned about your name being linked to this, or some senior people in the Directorate of Plans giving you a hard time, then don't. I have the ear of the DCI; this comes all the way from the top,” said Dempsey reasonably.

  Stanhope took in Dempsey's face for a moment longer, trying to read him. “Alright, here's what we'll do. As they say in the legal business, let's retire to my private chambers. Then we can talk.”

  * * *

  Stanhope's private chamber was actually the roof of the building. Clever, thought Dempsey. Hard to carry out surveillance on, nobody around and nobody to overhear them.

  He had barely made it to the top of the access stairs leading onto the roof when he felt the forceful push from behind. The blast sent him sprawling onto the gravel of the flat roof, and then he was yanked backwards so that he was facing the sky and felt the need
le sharp tip of a knife pressed against the side of his throat. He froze; keeping his hands where Stanhope could see them, because the last thing he wanted was to have the former CIA man slit his throat through a misunderstanding.

  “Don't move, Troy, keep still. It's not personal. I just need to be sure. Are you wearing a wire?” said Stanhope as he ran his hands over Dempsey's waist, up his chest and down the crease of his back.

  “Don't be an asshole, Joe, of course not.”

  But Stanhope continued on with the search until he was satisfied that Dempsey wasn't hooked up. “Okay, you're clean, you can stand up,” he said, slowly backing up and keeping the blade out front of him… just in case. “Now Troy, you're going to want to kick my ass, but let's not do this, okay. Friends?”

  Dempsey stood up, dusted off his jacket and straightened his tie. He took a deep breath and looked over at Stanhope. Probably in his position he'd have done much the same thing. Better to be safe than sorry. “Where the fuck did you get a prison shiv from anyway, Joe? You're a member of the legal profession.”

  Stanhope tucked the blade back into his shoe where it had been concealed and smiled. “Hey, this is Chicago. Capone may be long gone, but it's still a rough place, even more so for lawyers. It pays to have a little bit of an equalizer handy from time to time.”

  Dempsey flung out his hands in exasperation and stared around at the Chicago skyline. “Well lookee here, I'm not wired and no one else knows that we're up here and I have authority from the top man at CIA himself. So can you please stop dicking around and tell me what you know?”

  Stanhope nodded and motioned to the wall of a heating vent. Sit down, he seemed to be saying. Both men sat and watched as the late afternoon sun gave the city buildings a honey colored hue.

  “It was the night following the meeting between Higgins and Galerkin. As I mentioned, the team were on a high. Galerkin was doing his stuff and all we needed was for Higgins to give us the green light and the cogs of the CIA would have kicked in to secure our defector in place operation. Grimes phoned Higgins' hotel and asked to speak to him. Nothing official, just to invite him for a drink that evening before he flew out the next day. We got no answer, so I decided to call around to the hotel and pick him up. You know how these things work; you get a boss in town from headquarters and you're expected to wine and dine him and show him a good time. Plus, the rest of the station was in a celebrating mood, so we thought why not.”

  Dempsey nodded. It seemed reasonable, but he still wasn't sure where Stanhope's story was going.

  “Higgins was staying at a nice hotel over on Pohjoisesplanadi. I had his room number, so I made my way up and knocked on the door. No answer.”

  “Maybe he was asleep. Jet lag?” suggested Dempsey.

  “That's what I thought, so I let myself in,” said Stanhope, not a bit sheepishly. “I used my regulation lock-picks. I always had the knack with them.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. He wasn't there. Clothes, suitcase, bag; everything else was still in place, but no Higgins.”

  “Maybe he'd had the same idea as you and hit the bars?”

  “That's what I thought… maybe. It's just that Higgins didn't seem the type. He's too much of a square, plus he didn't know the area. I went back down to reception and asked if Mr. Higgins in room 708 had left that evening. The night porter said that no one had passed him and he'd been on duty since late afternoon. Wherever Higgins was, he'd snuck out and hadn't handed his key in to reception.”

  “Maybe he'd decided to meet up with a woman,” said Dempsey. Stanhope scowled. “Don't make me laugh. Something wasn't right. I was more worried that a senior CIA officer had gotten into some kind of trouble than anything else. I sat across from the hotel in the car until just after one in the morning. It was freezing and just as I was about to call it a night and raise the alarm at the Embassy that our visitor had gone missing, who should turn up, walking down the street, but Higgins, carrying an attaché case.”

  “Well, he'd obviously been somewhere. Perhaps someone else at the Embassy had hosted him?”

  “That's what I thought at the time. The next day, I was due to pick him up and drive him to the airport. I mentioned that we'd tried to call him the previous night to invite him out for a meal with the station officers. He shrugged it aside.”

  “Where had he been?”

  “Well now, that's the thing. He said he hadn't been anywhere. He reckoned he'd had a light supper and then turned in for an early night. Said he hadn't left the hotel at all,” said Stanhope.

  “Which is evidently not true, as confirmed by your brief spell of breaking and entering,” said Dempsey.

  “Exactly. A top CIA officer sneaks out from under the nose of a local station, disappears for several hours, turns up in the middle of the night carrying a briefcase and then says that he'd spent the night tucked up in bed. FUBAR!”

  Dempsey considered Stanhope's version. “Okay, so he got up to something, but it's hardly a criminal offence.”

  Stanhope laughed. “Troy I would have agreed with you totally, if it hadn't been for the next forty-eight hours' worth of events, when we got our operation cancelled by the same man and then our agent turns up dead. Higgins was the last CIA man to see him alive.”

  Dempsey looked incredulous. “You're saying there's a connection. That's pretty wild, Joe. You're a man of the law, where's the proof of any of that?”

  Stanhope shook his head, resigned to the fact that his theory would only ever be a theory. “That's the problem. Theories I have, actual proof I have none. But my guess is, that's why you're here. Something's happened back at Langley, something serious enough to have the Director send you in undercover and poking around. I don't know what that thing is, and I guess you're not going to give me the inside information about whatever it is you're investigating, but you've got to admit that what happened in Helsinki over those few days is certainly intriguing.”

  The sudden realization hit Dempsey like a shot from a heavyweight boxer. Higgins had deep sixed the proposed defection operation of Anatoli Galerkin.

  His final report had claimed the KGB man was obviously a plant and untrustworthy, this despite the vehement protestations of the CIA case officers who had dealt with the man. That and the fact that the Russian showed up dead. Could it have just been coincidence, or was it something more? Was it murder? Had he been eliminated in order to keep him silenced?

  Why would anyone, let alone a senior CIA officer, want to silence a potential defector in place from a rival service? Obvious really – the man was set to expose someone.

  Was Higgins a traitor? A deep cover KGB spy? But no, that didn't sit right, thought Dempsey. If this was a run-of-the-mill double agent inside CIA type operation, then maybe. But this was something else, something new, a hybrid operation. If it wasn't to protect a source, then the only other reason could be that the man had useful intelligence he wanted to trade, intelligence that someone else wanted to get to first. Get to, and perhaps keep.

  It was all mixed up in his head, he needed time to let it settle and then analyze it calmly. He turned his attention back to Stanhope, who was standing looking out at the traffic moving down below.

  “So what did you do next?”

  Stanhope shrugged. “Just what I told you. We fought against the decision about Galerkin for a while and demanded that the Directorate of Plans conduct a thorough investigation into how the operation was cancelled. But of course, by that time it was all over. Galerkin was dead and we were told to button it. I pushed for a few more weeks, but no one wanted to listen. Eventually I was getting lots of reprimands from Langley that weren't doing me any favors.”

  Stanhope spat onto the gravel roof in disgust. “By that time, I'd had enough, handed in my resignation, and worked my required time out. Two months later, I moved back here to join the family law firm. As for Galerkin, he was as tough as old shoe leather and all business. I'm not sure he did guilt as an emotion. He just wanted to get his wife and un
born child to the West.”

  Dempsey nodded in sympathy.

  Stanhope looked at him. “The next thing to ask, would be what was Higgins doing in the unaccounted for hours of that night? Where had he been, who had he been meeting, and most importantly of all what was in that attaché case that he had clutched to his chest?”

  Chapter Six

  “So you came all this way to see me. I'm honored.”

  They were sitting in one of the standard Arc Deco hotels that ran along the front of Miami Beach. It was all pink and blue pastels. The bar was mostly empty, except for a few Cubans and their women. Evening dinner time was over and now the night animals had come out to play.

  “Cut the crap, Paul, I'm here because I have to be, not because I want to be,” said Dempsey. He was nursing some kind of cocktail that he had no intention of drinking. The thing looked like a garden in a glass with a multi-colored straw sticking out of it.

  “Fair enough. So to what do I owe the pleasure, seeing as you're not actually a client,” said the tall, blond haired man in the snappy business suit. Paul was Paul Koening; former CIA officer who had worked with the anti-Castroists before, during, and after the fuck up that was the Bay of Pigs. He'd been kicked out of the Agency in the shake-up following Kennedy's assassination. Rather than up sticks and head back to Washington, Koening had decided to set up shop as a Miami-based private investigator.

  It evidently paid well, thought Dempsey, judging by the way Koening was flashing his cash. “You see many of the old team?” asked Dempsey. “Bump into anyone on a regular basis?”

  Koening waved a vague hand. “Jeez, Troy, you throw a stick around here and you're practically guaranteed to hit someone who's visited Langley. Miami's crawling with spooks. And as for the Cubans, it's like Havana down here. Do you know the Diaz brothers?”