by Alan Russell
Bernd was even more amused. “Not a fencing club. Not even close. Fencing clubs have blunted blades with a protective covering on the end. They swing thin little foils and wear protective masks. The shaving club boys fight for real blood. They win their match by making schnitzel out of their opponent’s cheeks and forehead.”
Graham looked at the Thierrys. Both of them were nodding, apparently familiar with the custom.
“How many of these fraternities are there?” asked Graham.
Bernd shrugged. “Probably, two, three hundred.”
It wasn’t what Graham wanted to hear, and his face showed it.
“It’s not so bad as that,” said Bernd. “Our boy did his dueling in the Black Circle. Schmiss was in the Kosener Corps.”
“That’s the name of his fraternity?”
Bernd shook his head. “There are different dueling associations. The Weinheimer Corps are usually attached to technical universities, while the Landsmannschaften are town or community groups. If you belong to the Deutsche Burschenschaft, you probably enjoy goose-stepping and reminiscing about the Third Reich. They hold nationalism in one hand, and the sword in another. The Kosener Corps are the most serious of the duelists. They are associated with a university, and their traditions go back for centuries. They have their dueling colors and sayings, their own little brotherhood really. I’d guess there are about seventy-five universities that have their Kosener Corps.”
“How do you know Schmiss was in the Kosener Corps?”
“The one time I met with him, we each had a beer. Old habits die hard. It is tradition for those in the Kosener Corps to never drink alone. Each of the drinkers is expected to raise their glass to their companion before drinking and say, ‘Prost.’ Then, after drinking, they lift the glass from chin to eye level in a kind of salute before setting it down.”
“And Schmiss did that?”
“He tried not to. Most of his stein was empty before he reverted to his old habit. And he only did it the one time. But I had seen that gesture before and knew where it came from.”
Graham nodded with grudging respect. The man who had tried to kill him was observant. He had doubted whether Bernd would be of any help, had figured his negotiations with Pierre were conducted for the sole purpose of escaping incarceration. Instead, he appeared to be assisting him as much as he could. Bernd seemed to read Graham’s thoughts.
“We are on the same side now,” Bernd said. “I want you to succeed. I want you to kill Schmiss.”
“Why is that?”
“Because if you don’t kill him, he will hunt us down and kill us.”
“I’ll do my best to give him your regards,” Graham said.
Bernd found that funny. The pain medication must have really been kicking in by that time.
The day was waning, and so were Graham’s hopes. His search seemed to be going in slow motion. It didn’t help that he wasn’t familiar with the city, and drove with one eye on a map and the other on the streets. His German had been getting a workout. There were five Berlin universities with active Kosener Corps, but the number of dueling fraternities had declined over the years. Getting the opportunity to have your face cut open apparently wasn’t as popular as it used to be. It was possible Schmiss had been a member of one of those corps that had disbanded. If that was the case, there was little chance that Graham could track him down. He had struck out at Guestphalia and Marchia. Three corps were still on his list: Normannia, Borussia, and Vandalia-Teutonia.
“Third time’s a charm,” Graham said to himself as he made his way toward the Kneipe, the banquet hall, for Corps Normannia. He expected their setup would be much the same as he had encountered at Guestphalia and Marchia, the two fraternities he visited earlier in the day. Both of their display areas had been in their banquet halls. Behind glass were swords, ribbons, trophies, and old photographs, and hanging on the walls were framed pictures. The mottoes and corps colors changed from school to school, but little else was different.
Graham arrived at the Corps Normannia banquet hall without an escort. Now that he knew the corps setup, he decided it would be better to trespass and beg forgiveness rather than chance being denied permission to visit. The Kneipe was locked, but one of the doors had an encouraging jiggle. Graham pulled out a credit card, looked around in both directions, and worked on the latch. It took him less than a minute to spring the door open.
The room wasn’t overlarge, maybe fifteen hundred square feet. Blue, silver, and black ribbons decorated one wall, the apparent corps colors. The ribbons accented large, bold letters, which read: Durch Kampf zum Sieg, durch Nacht zum Licht. Graham came up with the translation: Through battle to victory, through night toward light. It wasn’t the kind of thing he heard people in LA saying very often.
Graham went to the display area and skipped over the current pictures. He needed to look at the windows to the past. Schmiss didn’t strike him as the kind of individual who would be paying alumni dues to the Alte Herren. Unfortunately, only dues-paying graduates had individually framed photos. Graham also thought it unlikely that Schmiss would attend the Stiftungsfêst—the foundation anniversary and reunion gatherings—but he took a close look at all those group shots anyway. The face of Schmiss didn’t jump out.
For much of his adult life, Graham’s work had forced him to study pictures. He had scanned countless proof sheets and had a trained eye for detail. He could pick out one face among many as few others could. But now he also had to imagine a younger Schmiss, had to remove years off his features, perhaps even had to find him without his scar.
Graham studied yet another older group photo. The corps brothers looked like any other sporting team, young men posing for the camera. There seemed to be an unwritten rule in all the Kosener Corps that smiling for any picture was verboten. Graham went down the line of faces. He was about to go on to the next picture when one face stopped him.
The young man had left a space between himself and the rest of his brethren. He was posed more casually, wasn’t throwing back his shoulders or sticking out his chest. He wasn’t smiling, but showed a hint of an arrogant smirk. Though he was off to the side of the picture, he somehow seemed to be center stage. It was probably his eyes. They bored into the camera.
His eyes hadn’t changed.
The young man in the photo had a face that was smooth and unlined. He barely looked old enough to shave. The picture had been taken before his own close shave. His body type hadn’t changed much over the years. He had probably put on twenty pounds, all of it muscle.
Graham didn’t have any doubts. It was Schmiss.
He even came with a name. According to the picture, Graham was looking at Hans Jaeger.
CHAPTER
FORTY-TWO
Just before his flight, Graham made his phone call. When Pierre Thierry answered the phone he sounded positively groggy.
“His name is Hans Jaeger,” Graham said, speaking softly.
Graham could hear the phone being repositioned. He imagined Pierre was now sitting up straight and a light was being turned on. The Thierrys were staying about an hour outside of Paris at the house of friends who were out of the country. They had taken Bernd with them. In the background Graham could hear Odile whispering to her husband in French. “Oui, oui,” Pierre impatiently answered, then rattled off something in French about going to get a pen and paper.
A few moments later, when he apparently had the necessary implements in hand, Pierre cleared his throat and said, “Spell it.”
Graham did. Then he said, “The day after tomorrow, in the early morning, I want you to take that name to your friends.”
“Friends,” said Pierre, making the word sound the opposite of that. “Why the day after tomorrow?”
“Because I need the time.”
Graham had spent the night buying dinner and drinks, lots of drinks, with a former corps brother of Jae
ger’s who lived in Berlin. Jaeger had dropped off the radar right after college, and he hadn’t turned up at any of the reunions, but one of his old dueling chums had run into him a few years back. Herr Jaeger had left the old country and gone west. Graham had a line on where he supposedly worked.
“Remember,” Graham said, “you don’t want a one-on-one. I want you to do your presentation in front of a committee.”
Pierre didn’t sound happy about that. “Confess to a den of thieves.”
His reluctance was obvious. If word of Pierre’s activities got out, the French government would likely throw him and his wife in prison. All of them, thought Graham, had that unpleasant reality in common. The French did not tolerate spying, even if it was for a supposedly friendly nation. Graham thought about Lanie, and how she had been compromised. Ideology, not money, had done her in. Agents in the Directorate of Operations were adept at recruiting informants. That was their job. Graham knew the system. To get pictures, he often did much the same thing.
Even though there didn’t appear to be any prying ears around him, Graham continued to speak cryptically. “They’ll understand the need for sensitivity. It matches their own. It can’t be like last time.”
Pierre’s last contact with the CIA had occurred when he and Odile returned from the country and found their Citroën missing and the French police looking for just such a car. Pierre called the man who recruited him thirty years earlier when both of them were young, the same man who had been his contact for many years. When they met, Walter Carey was a junior case officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations division. His main job was the recruiting of foreigners for the purpose of gathering intelligence. Getting Thierry was his big coup. Over the years, both men had risen through the ranks. Carey had promised his old source that he would replace the Citroën in a “hush-hush operation” that would save both Pierre and the Agency from any embarrassment. Everything, Carey said, would be kept between them. He knew just the man who would confidentially “tidy up everything.”
Carey asked for photos of the car, and as many details about it as the Thierrys could provide. Pierre said that Carey inquired about his retirement, and mentioned that he would soon be joining him in “the good life.” That never happened. Carey died in a car accident several months later, but not before he made good on his promise. According to Thierry, within five days of his call to Carey an identical Citroën suddenly appeared in his garage. It was a carbon copy of the old one, even down to a few small dents. Only a few small giveaways clued Pierre into the fact that it wasn’t the same car.
“Tell them to search the waters where I told you,” Graham said. “There, they will find your Citroën.”
“I will.”
“How is our friend?” Graham asked.
“He whines like a baby, eats like a pig, and expects to be pampered like royalty.”
The ex-Stasi agent was making the best out of the situation.
“I’ll try and call you tomorrow,” Graham said.
He put away his cell phone, and then tried to think through all his weariness. It was possible he had just thrown Pierre to the wolves, but he didn’t think so. The cover-up didn’t feel like a sanctioned CIA operation even though Iran-Contra had proved you could have a rogue operation going on without the Agency’s official blessing.
Over the loudspeaker Graham heard the announcement that his flight was boarding.
CHAPTER
FORTY-THREE
Though he had gotten little sleep in the past week, Blackwell arrived at work in a good mood. Pilgrim was dead, and Jaeger was tying up the other loose ends. His plan was going to work. Polls showed that Tennesson was a shoo-in. After he was elected, Blackwell would arrange a meeting. He would tell Tennesson about certain information that had reached him and how he had taken it upon himself to suppress it. Blackwell wouldn’t need to resort to blackmail. Tennesson would want him close by. The vault would be opened to him, information and power for the taking.
Blackwell opened the door to his office, what he referred to as his “rabbit hutch.” For as long as Blackwell had worked at the CIA, space at Langley had always been at a premium. He was fortunate he wasn’t an analyst working out of one of those endless rows of six foot by six foot cubicles. The average grave was larger than a CIA work area.
He sat down in his chair and leaned back. At least he had that much room, if only barely. Blackwell even had a window to look out of, but he knew his office was still a long ways from the seventh-floor spacious accommodations of the director.
That had been one of the good things about being out in the field. You had elbow room out there. For his own purposes, the less time he spent in Virginia, the better. Blackwell had started as a case officer in the Directorate of Operations, which was now called the National Clandestine Service. His primary job had been the recruiting and running of foreign agents, work that had taken him around the globe. Learning how to deal with the CIA’s stifling bureaucracy had been a long lesson in patience. Jumping through those hoops had killed the initiative of many case officers, but not his. Blackwell had understood the need to learn the rules of the game.
If the CIA was a business, Blackwell thought, it would have had to declare bankruptcy long ago. Because the Agency was cloaked from outsiders, it got away with its many sins of omission. By and large, it was the incompetents who rose to the top, because they buffered the bureaucracy. As a fledgling case officer, Blackwell watched others get promoted because they had recruited more agents. It didn’t matter that their agents were incompetent and poorly placed. Higher-ups saw it as a numbers game. The more “scalps” you could show—recruits who were supposedly working and supplying information to you—the better job you were deemed to be doing. By and large, most of the case officers Blackwell worked with didn’t know the language, customs, or history of the area they served, and they had no desire to learn. They all but begged to be hoodwinked, and their superiors were no better. It was enough to get him thinking . . .
The system also interfered with getting good, complete intelligence from analysts. To get promoted, specialization was a bad thing. You rose up the ladder by moving around. It was unusual for a DO analyst to spend more than a few years in a given country or area.
Time and time again, Blackwell had seen the best and the brightest quit the Agency, beaten by the bureaucracy. Half of his “class” was gone within a decade. The survivors were probably more like Aldrich Ames than they would have cared to admit. Ames was disenchanted with his work for many years before he did anything about it. He was a drunk who was indifferent about his job and suspicious of his fellow agents. Ames was an incompetent senior case officer, but that didn’t stop him from being firmly entrenched in the bureaucracy as a mid-level officer.
When Blackwell had first started working for the CIA, he had assumed his skills and Ivy League credentials would soon catapult him into the top ranks. He hungered to be privy to the world’s secrets, and dreamed of running one of the CIA’s fiefdoms, or even being in charge of the entire game. But he was never accepted into the club. Oh, higher-ups gave him glimpses of it, but he was like a gardener trimming the shrubbery around the clubhouse. His rise through the ranks was not meteoric, but merely steady. Along the way, one or more of his superiors decided he was a hardworking drone, smart enough to be sure, but not fast-track royalty.
Professional limbo hadn’t sat well with Blackwell. Though he had no stomach for office politics, and seemed incapable of glad-handing or brownnosing, he never lost his burning ambition. He transferred around the Agency, looking for the right opportunity for him. Eventually he settled in the Directorate of Intelligence. It was obvious to Blackwell that his best chances for “personal growth” were with the Counternarcotics Center, especially after it expanded its mission to deal with international organized crime.
Blackwell turned on his computer. It was a shame, really, that he even had to report to Lang
ley, but former director John Deutch’s use of his personal computer had caused a bit of a shakedown of the troops. The director had stored some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets on his computer, the same unsecured computer that was used to access pornographic websites, as well as send and transmit e-mail. Since then, antennae had been raised to make sure sensitive information remained on the grounds. For Blackwell, that meant his monitoring had to be done at Langley.
Not that he was worried. Even after Ames, there was still virtually no in-house policing. Police forces in all major cities in the country had their version of an internal affairs division, but that was something the CIA had never instituted. Maybe that explained how for nine long years Ames had blatantly passed on information. You would have expected heads to roll, but the bureaucracy covered all asses. No one in the Agency lost their job because of Ames.
Blackwell had a theory about Ames’s ability to operate without anybody noticing. The longer you stayed at the Agency, the more invisible you became. Channel the right reports and paperwork, and it was easy to disappear right in front of everyone’s eyes.
That’s what I am, thought Blackwell. The invisible man. Unseen, but with long fingers.
Blackwell tapped out his identification, then entered a series of passwords that allowed him to access a series of restricted handling files. He was careful in the way he did it. The in-house computers left trails, and though it was unlikely anyone was looking over his shoulder, Blackwell always made sure he had a logical explanation for everything he did. That was why he waited almost an hour before pulling up Pilgrim’s file.
The man had been lucky for too long. They should have had him in their sights the moment he left de Gaulle Airport, but Blackwell had accessed his credit information too late. Pilgrim had bought his ticket at LAX, and while Blackwell had slept, he had flown across the ocean. Not that it had done him any good.
Blackwell studied the information on his computer screen. As a rule, the CIA doesn’t keep tabs on American citizens, but those with suspected drug and mob ties garnered the interest of Counternarcotics. Pilgrim was on his watch list. He wasn’t “high tier,” wasn’t numbered among those who merited constant scrutiny, but he was designated for monitoring.
