by Gayle Lynds
When a car’s motor sounded, Tice whirled. Rifles lashed around menacingly. The engine was a deep purr—large and expensive, its timing impeccable. A Mercedes. As soon as Tice read the license plate, he waved an arm backward in a wide swing that those on both sides of the bridge could see, signaling everyone to stand down.
Wearing a camel’s hair overcoat, Palmer Westwood stepped quickly from the luxury car. His thick hair was pepper gray, his features sharp, angular, and grave. Fifty-two years old, Westwood was the CIA’s new Associate Deputy Director of Operations, the ADDO, just in from Langley. He was late.
As he hurried toward them, he glanced at the terrorist. “Any trouble?”
Al-Hadi’s face was expressionless.
“Quiet so far,” Tice told Westwood. “How was your flight?”
“Too long.” Westwood reached inside his coat and pulled out his pocket watch. The fob was a small gold triangle—flat, with two jagged edges.
“We should go.” Tice noted the gold piece. Beneath his shirt was a similar triangle, hanging from a gold chain.
Westwood read the time. “I should say so.”
Tice signaled. The soldiers closed in, and they advanced as a group, passing the sign that warned ominously in four languages: YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR. The old steel bridge was radiant, ablaze in arc lights. It stretched ahead more than four hundred feet. For the first time, al-Hadi looked at it. Then he stared. But instead of with hunger, his black eyes burned with a fury he could no longer hide, and Tice began to understand his silence and apparent lack of interest in the bridge.
“Come over here,” Tice ordered as they stopped at the bridge’s edge. On either side, the dark forest was hushed, still, almost predatory. “Stay on my left.” The terrorist was right-handed. Tice turned away so al-Hadi could not see as he quickly unbuttoned his coat, pulled his pistol from the holster, and slid it into his waistband. He put another item into his left pocket.
When al-Hadi hesitated, a GI used his M-16 to prod him into position. Tice raised his wrist to check his watch again and peered across just as Raina Manhardt looked up from hers. They nodded to one another, and both stepped forward alone, two enemy intelligence officers doing their duty. Al-Hadi instantly caught up with Tice. Manhardt slowed for the Jewish doctor to join her. The walk had begun. As an icy wind gusted off the river, the two operatives and their charges advanced across Glienicke Bridge.
Tice moved close to al-Hadi and spoke in English: “You’re damn lucky. If Dr. Abendroth weren’t a cause célebre, you wouldn’t be going home.”
Al-Hadi’s gaze was locked on the small Soviet doctor in the distance.
Tice studied his intense profile. “That’s it, isn’t it?” he continued softly. “A Jew is saving your life. Worse, a human-rights Jewish activist the West reveres.”
“Mabahibish khanzeereen,” Al-Hadi sneered. His right hand twitched.
Immediately, Tice used both hands to slap a handcuff on the wrist and squeeze it tight enough to inhibit circulation. “Keep walking. Now I’ve got a gun pointed at you under my coat, too. Dammit, don’t pull away. You don’t want anyone to see this. Ala tool. Ala ikobri.”
“Kufr. Infidels! The Jews are the enemies of Islam. Jews are the source of all conflicts! They are liars. Murderers. They have stolen the Palestinians’ homeland. And you Americans are pigs for supporting them! If I am defending my home, no one can call me a terrorist. All infidels must die!”
“If you hadn’t behaved yourself in lockup, I never would’ve been able to talk Langley into letting you go—even for someone of Abendroth’s stature. Your family’s paying a fortune for your freedom. Up to now, you’ve been smart. But you’ll never make it home alive if you don’t drop whatever you’re carrying in your right hand.”
Al-Hadi’s head whipped around. “What? How did you know?” His pinched face showed the pain caused by the constricting handcuff.
For the past month, ever since his capture in the shootout in West Berlin, al-Hadi had tried to hide his intelligence behind a mask of indifference. But Tice had noted his watchful gaze, the small advantages he created for himself, and his ability to perceive routine in an apparently randomized interrogation schedule. His intelligence would argue against self-destruction.
“Experience. Keep walking.” Tice tightened it more. “Get rid of the weapon, or you’ll never see Damascus again.”
For the first time, doubt flickered in the young man’s face.
“Drop it, son,” Tice said instantly. “You’d be insane not to want to go home, and this is the only chance you’ll get. Drop it.”
The fire that had burned so feverishly in al-Hadi’s eyes died. His fingers opened. As they progressed toward the bridge’s center, a razored metal file fell silently into the snow, a weapon of close assassination. Al-Hadi turned away, but not before Tice saw his humiliation. He had failed.
Then al-Hadi’s lips thinned. He seemed to gather himself. “Release me!” he demanded.
Tice considered, then reached over and unlocked the handcuff.
Al-Hadi gave no acknowledgment. Instead, he lifted his chin defiantly and fixed his rigid gaze on the desolate silhouettes of leafless trees on the hilly horizon. Neither spoke as they continued on across the bridge.
At last they reached the four-inch-wide white line that marked the border. As a gust of the bitter wind needled his face, Tice stopped a yard away, following protocol. But his wiry prisoner merely paused, then bolted toward the line.
“Halt!” Tice made a show of grabbing for his arm.
“La’a!” Without a glance at Dr. Abendroth, he hurtled onward, running a zigzag course as if dodging a storm of bullets. Clouds of brittle snow exploded from his heels.
Tice gazed steadily and coolly at Raina Manhardt. “I wish I could say it was a pleasure.” He spoke in German.
The Stasi officer’s eyes flashed, and she responded in English with a perfect American accent: “So we meet again, Comrade Tice.” She turned on her boot heel and left to follow her charge.
Tice stared after her a few seconds, then turned and walked forward, extending his hand. “Dr. Abendroth, it’s an honor.”
“Spaseeba!” Abendroth was excited. He pumped the hand and stepped across the border into the West. “My knees ache, or I would fall down and kiss this old bridge.”
They turned in unison and strode off. The cold seemed to settle into Tice’s bones. He took a deep breath.
“You were worried?” Dr. Abendroth asked curiously. He had the wrinkled skin of a seventy-year-old although he was only in his forties.
“Of course. And you?”
“I gave that up long ago.” The dissident’s smile deepened. “I prefer to think of pleasant things.”
The return trip seemed longer to Tice. Ahead, in the sheen of the artificial illumination, with the first rays of a flinty dawn rising slowly, almost reluctantly above the bleak hills, the waiting party of armed soldiers resembled a still life from some military album. Only Palmer Westwood seemed real. In his camel’s hair overcoat, he stalked back and forth, furiously smoking a cigarette.
As soon as they stepped onto land, Tice introduced the two men.
The small, shabby pediatrician took the hand of the tall, urbane CIA official. “You came just to welcome me, Mr. Westwood? You are so civilized. I have shaken no one’s hand in friendship in years, other than another prisoner’s. And now I have done it twice within minutes.” He turned toward the stately Mercedes, where the driver stood at the open rear door, waiting. “My chariot?”
Tice looked at it, too. “Yes.”
With a crisp nod, Dr. Abendroth marched off alone, his head rotating as if his eyes were memorizing the world, while Palmer Westwood followed. Tice paused and checked over his shoulder. On the other end of the bridge, Raina Manhardt and the young radical were approaching their Zil limousine.
When Tice looked back, Westwood had stopped to grind out his cigarette beneath the toe of his wingtip. Quickly, Tice shifted his focu
s to Abendroth, monitoring his approach to the open door of the luxury sedan. It was time. Taking a small step backward, he squared his shoulders and gave an almost imperceptible nod.
The percussive noise of a single rifle shot splintered the quiet dawn. Blood and bone fragments exploded into the air, and Pavel Abendroth pitched forward, the back of his skull shattered by a bullet. As rifles froze, then moved violently, searching for a target, one of the dissident’s arms bounced off the door frame and landed hard inside the sedan.
Across the bridge, Raina Manhardt shoved a gaping Faisal al-Hadi into the limo and dove in after him. At the same time, Tice ran to Abendroth, bellowing at his people to call in the attack and go after the sniper.
With the stench of hot blood filling his nostrils, Tice crouched. The pediatrician lay crumpled on a patch of dirty snow. He picked up the hand that had fallen inside the car. Thick calluses and ragged scars covered the palm, showing the brutal labor and torture Abendroth had endured.
Tice found the fluttering pulse in Abendroth’s wrist just before it stopped. He closed the dead man’s staring eyes, then lifted his head to watch across the length of Glienicke Bridge. Tires spinning on the snow, the Communist limo shot off toward East Berlin.
One
April 2005
Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex
Allenwood, Pennsylvania
At 6:40 AM, ten minutes past morning call at the crowded federal penitentiary in the Susquehanna Valley, a stranger in civilian clothes marched down a gray cell block, staring straight ahead. A BOP lieutenant led; two guards followed. All looked uneasy.
The man paused at a cell. As soon as the door opened, he moved inside and glared down at the solitary cot. The blanket had been yanked aside to reveal blue prison trousers and shirt, both stuffed with crumpled newspapers. They had been arranged to mimic a man lying on his side. There was also a fake wood arm covered with smooth flesh-colored upholstery from the prison factory. With the pillow pounded high as if it covered a head, and the blanket on top exposing part of the arm, not even the obligatory flash of a guard’s light during night-time checks would reveal no one slept here.
“Clever bastard.” The stranger jerked a cellphone from his pocket. He punched in a number, tucked his head, and kept his voice low: “He’s gone all right. I’m in his cell now. I’ll—”
“Seal the cell off,” the voice on the other end of the line interrupted. “No one’s to search it, understand? And for God’s sake, make sure no one tells the press that Jay Tice has escaped!”
Langley, Virginia
At 8:06 AM, Laurence Litchfield, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations—the DDO—hand-carried a sealed white envelope down from the seventh floor to the Staff Operations Center, the SOC, which was responsible for case-management support to colleagues in the field. In his mid-forties, he was lean, with a runner’s wiry body and a lanky gait. His eyes were carved deep into his face. Above them, wide brows formed an ink-black line across his forehead.
The SOC chief looked up from her desk. “Good morning, Mr. Litchfield. We got some overnight requests from our people in Yemen and Qatar. I was going to memo you about our progress with the summit, but I can fill you in now.”
“First I need to talk to one of your people—Elaine Cunningham.”
She noted the envelope in his hand. “Cunningham? You know she’s sidelined.”
“I know. Show me where she is.”
She nodded and led him out the door and down two long corridors and into a room crammed with gray modular cubicles which someone long ago had cynically dubbed the Parking Lot. Here a glacially changing landscape of some three dozen field officers waited like used cars collecting dust, futures uncertain. Their covers had been irrevocably blown, or they had proved inept, or they had run into Langley politics. For many, the next stop was the tedium of personnel or recruitment or curriculum—or, worst case, dismissal.
The chief pointed out Cunningham’s cubicle among the maze, and Litchfield thanked her. “Go up to my office. I’ll meet you there.”
She left, and he turned down the narrow aisle and found Elaine Cunningham in her cramped enclosure, marching back and forth beside her desk, arms crossed, her shoulder propping her phone against her ear as she talked quietly into it. She was a small woman, twenty-nine years old and blond, dressed in a tailored black jacket, white T-shirt, and belted black pants.
As he leaned against the frame of her cubicle to study her, she glanced up and recognized him. She winked one large blue eye in greeting.
And continued talking into the phone: “So your missing source is a broker in Brussels. He’s a morose Dane, unmarried, follows soccer. He didn’t show up for a blind date yesterday and missed the alternate meet this morning. Now you have word he’s in the wind, and Copenhagen can’t find him.” She pursed her lips. Her pace quickened. “All Scandinavians tend to be stereotyped as morose, but there are real national differences. It’s the Swedes who are mostly angst-ridden, while the Danes are more happy-go-lucky. So your morose Dane may actually be Swedish, and if he’s driving home, he probably didn’t stop in Copenhagen but took the resund Fixed Link across the sound into Malmö. When amateurs change identities, they usually create legends based on what they already know. If he’s Swedish—especially if he comes from the Malmö area—it’s possible he knows Copenhagen well enough to fake it as his hometown, and if he does, it’s a good bet he speaks Danish like a native.”
Cunningham paused, listening. “My pleasure. No, this is the end of the Langley road for me. Hey, it’s been great working with you, too. You always give me interesting questions.” As she hung up, she grabbed the single sheet of paper in her printer tray. “Morning, Mr. Litchfield. This is my lucky day. Who would’ve thought I’d get to resign to the DDO himself? Just to make it official, here’s my letter.”
Litchfield was unsurprised. “You’ll make your psychologist happy.” He took the letter, folded it into his pocket, and sat in the only side chair.
“That’s what I’m all about—making CIA clinicians happy.” Her smile did not involve her eyes.
“I suspect you don’t really want to quit. People who excel seldom do.”
As Litchfield continued to watch, she blinked, then sank into her desk chair. Dressed in her simple black and white clothes, her hair smoothed back into a ponytail at the nape of her neck, and wearing little makeup, she could pass as a cop or the leader of a gang of thieves. This flexibility of affect would be easier for her than for some because she was neither beautiful nor ugly. Still, she was pretty enough that she could use her looks: Her face was slender, her cheekbones good, her classic features slightly irregular, and her golden hair shone. Litchfield had studied her file. Now he had seen her. So far, she was perfect.
“What you say has a certain truth to it,” she acknowledged. “But I’ve also heard it said that a rut is just like a grave—only longer. I’m in a rut. I’m not doing Langley any good, and I’m not doing myself any good. It’s time to get on with my life, such as it is.” She gazed at the white envelope in his hand, then peered at him curiously. “But I think you have something else in mind.”
He inclined his head. “I have a job tailored to your talents…and to your limitations. To do it, you’ll be in the field alone, which you seem to prefer anyway.”
“Not necessarily. It’s just that the bodies Langley kept sending to partner with me turned out to be less than stellar.”
“You don’t trust anyone, do you?”
“My mother. I’m fond of my mother. I trust her. Unfortunately, she lives far away, in California.”
“You trusted your husband, too. But he’s dead. Afghanistan, right?”
For a moment, she appeared speechless. She seemed to shrink, grow calcified, as hard as a tombstone.
He pushed her again: “You’ve had a problem working with people since he died. Your psychologist has recommended Langley let you go.”
Instead of exploding, she nodded. Her expression was
grim.
“You were one of our best hunters,” Litchfield said. “Right now, I need the best.” Although she remained silent, a reflective look crossed her face. She was a hunter. Her specialty was locating missing spies, assets gone to ground, “lost” foreign agents—anyone in the covert world of interest to Langley who had vanished, and doing it in such a way that the public never knew.
It was time to change the subject. “Why do you think you were so successful?”
“Probably because I simply have a knack for it,” she said. “I steep myself in the psychology of my target until the physical evidence and clues take on new meaning. That’s all there is to it.”
For the first time, he smiled. “No, there’s far more than that.” She was modest, and she had not lost her temper. All things considered, she was definitely his best choice.
Eyeing him speculatively, she said, “When the DDO comes to call, I figure something important has happened. And when I’m on the verge of being fired and he still comes to call, I figure it could be crucial. So let me help you out—if you think I can do the job, tell me what it is, and I’ll tell you whether I can or want to take it on.”
He looked around. “Not here. The assignment is with one of our special units. And it’s M-classified.” “M” indicated an extraordinarily sensitive covert operation. Among the highest the United States could bestow, single-letter security clearances meant the information was so secret it could be referred to only by initials.
Her blue eyes snapped with excitement. “As long as I don’t have to mommy fools, I’ll deliver.”
“Here’s the address and the name of your contact.” Litchfield handed her the envelope. “It’s the usual protocol—you hunt, our regular people capture. Read, memorize, then shred. Good luck.”
