by Alan Russell
Graham asked, “When did I first turn up in one of these reports?”
Blue and Brown opened their folders, examined the paperwork, but said nothing.
“You know I can clam up right now,” said Graham. “I don’t have to say another word to you. You can give me a date at least.”
“You came to our attention over three years ago,” said Blue.
Graham thought for a moment. The Gray Man would have wanted to tie everything neatly together.
“Probably in late August,” said Graham. “In fact it would have been August twenty-eighth, is that right?”
The two agents didn’t answer. They didn’t even blink. But Graham knew he had a bingo.
The Gray Man would have known there were some witnesses to Graham’s arrival and stay in Paris. Fact and fiction. Graham suspected the Gray Man was in Paris then. He would have helped out with the Citroën. That’s how he had gotten on everything so quickly.
“I need to know what I was doing on August twenty-eighth,” said Graham, “and I need to know the times I was under surveillance.”
The agents didn’t answer.
“I want to prove to you that I am innocent,” said Graham. “You can give me that much at least.”
This time it was Blue who relented. “You were seen joining a suspect we had under surveillance in the very early morning. Some of your conversation was overheard.”
“What time did this happen?”
“You arrived very late, at just after one in the morning, and stayed for approximately half an hour.”
“What lounge? Where?”
“The Côte d’Or. It’s on the Right Bank.”
There it was, thought Graham. The Gray Man had wrapped him up neatly. It was time he couldn’t possibly account for. And what kind of alibi was it to say that he was busy killing two of the most beloved people in the world at that time? The Gray Man had known his Achilles’ heel. He had probably believed that Graham could never own up to what he had done in Paris that night. And even if he tried, there was no evidence to support his assertion. No witnesses.
“Before I continue,” said Graham, “I need to know that both of you were not involved in the surveillance that placed me in Paris.”
“Why do you want to know that?” asked Brown.
“Because this time you have a very smart Aldrich Ames in your midst. He’s incredibly thorough. He’s covered his ass, and to do that he’s blackmailed, and murdered, and done God knows what. So I need to know that neither one of you is that man.”
“We had no involvement in Paris,” said Blue.
“What if I can prove that the August twenty-eighth meeting I was supposed to be attending is a lie?” said Graham. “What if I can show beyond a shadow of a doubt that I wasn’t in that lounge at that time?”
“We’re listening,” said Blue.
Graham shook his head. “You have to be more than listening. Someone’s put a straitjacket around me, but there is one flaw. As far as I know, it might be the only flaw in my being set up. And if I’m going to yank on that loose end, I’m going to need your agency’s help to unravel the rest of the lies. That might take a lot of work, because this man’s clever, and smart, and I need to know you’ll be willing to turn over all the rocks to get one of your own.”
“Give us something to start turning them,” said Brown, “and we will.”
“I need some more assurances first. I need someone high up in the Agency in on this, the head of the Directorate of Intelligence preferably. And I want the chain of evidence to be documented from start to finish.”
“Anything else you want?” said Blue, not hiding his sarcasm.
“We’ll start with that,” said Graham. “And some aspirin.”
He hurt all over. His body seemed to be reliving the sword fight all over again. But Graham knew he was about to feel even worse.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-FOUR
Looking back, it made sense.
Monroe had pushed him on the point, and offered him an exorbitant amount of money.
But Graham hadn’t bitten at his blood money. Something about the way Monroe did his probing had made him distrustful. It wasn’t anything Graham could put a finger on, but just a feeling. Still, he had been tempted to cash in, of course. But a part of him, the part that felt he was responsible for the accident, couldn’t do that. No one would ever mistake Graham for a saint, but that was one instance when he didn’t want to profit from what he had done.
On his pilgrimage in Spain, the memory card had been in his pocket every inch of the five-hundred-mile journey. There were days when what was on that card weighed him down like he was carrying millstones. Every time he emptied his pockets it was a reminder of what he had done. Not that he needed the reminder. He couldn’t escape the tunnel.
Graham felt like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, but with a different kind of albatross around his neck. He wanted to get rid of the memory card, but couldn’t. It bound him. Time and again he vowed to destroy it, to lose it forever, but it had a power over him. There were times he stared at it for hours on end. That was what his life had come down to. Graham never looked at the images on the card, afraid to open Pandora’s box.
He carried the card with him around the world. His only fear was that it might be posthumously brought to light, but he deserved that.
Only death didn’t come.
When Graham returned to America, he was finally able to put it aside. It had burdened him for long enough. He deposited the card in a safe-deposit box. At least he didn’t have to look at it. Since then it had just sat.
Waiting.
After all this time, he wondered about the condition of the memory card. It had been in a container, but it was possible the pictures wouldn’t even turn out. The conditions hadn’t been optimal. Most of the pictures came from a shoot and run on a dark night. Some of the shots had been taken without a flash, and some with. The pictures could be overexposed or underexposed. And even with autofocus, there was no guarantee he had gotten a good bead on the speeding Peugeot. Everything could be a blur.
Graham didn’t voice his uncertainty to the CIA. He was escorted to his safe-deposit box. Now it had all come down to this. He put the memory card into the slot of a computer, and waited to see what would appear. He wasn’t the only one: the CIA was watching with him.
The images showed themselves. There was Anne Godwin looking at him, every inch a lady.
Graham was doing his best not to react. He was glad Brown and Blue and the assistant director of the Directorate of Intelligence weren’t looking at him. All their attention was on the monitor and the photos now on display.
Some of the shots were blurred beyond recognition and for a moment Graham thought the Gray Man had won.
But then other pictures revealed themselves. The photos of the Peugeot and its occupants approaching the tunnel were seen in all too vivid detail.
Graham blinked away his tears. The spooks weren’t going to see him break down. Later, when he was alone, he would. He spoke carefully, concentrating on the words. He wasn’t going to let his voice break, not now, and not in front of them. He went through the sequence of shots, remembering the moments up until the crash.
But he really didn’t need the pictures to remind him of that night in the Tunnel of Death. For years, he had been living that night. In his mind’s eye, Graham remembered everything. But the images were amazingly clear for the conditions under which they had been taken.
Graham gave the CIA his proof of innocence, and his proof of guilt, all in one package.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-FIVE
When Blackwell learned of Jaeger’s death, he considered taking leave of the game. Money wasn’t a problem. Monroe had set up several offshore accounts for him. And Blackwell had identities and papers cached in safe-deposit boxes around the globe. He was
confident that he could disappear without a trace, but that wasn’t something he wanted to do. His prize would be denied him.
Blackwell had neither the personality nor the stomach for politics. He didn’t like chicken dinners and he didn’t like suffering fools. But he had the ambition of politicians, the drive to hold power. Now, he just needed to be patient a little longer. His plan still appeared to be viable. As far as he knew, no one had connected the dots between Lanie Byrne and the vice president, let alone the death of the bicyclist, and that wasn’t something that the actress or politician would ever disclose. It was the paparazzo the Agency was interested in, and the death of Monroe. That was how Blackwell had arranged it.
Monroe had been living on borrowed time for years. No matter how much you laundered money, you could never quite get the stain of the dirt off your hands. The FBI was finally realizing just how pervasive Russian insiders were at Western banks and securities firms. To penetrate the US financial system, the Russian mob had placed moles inside financial institutions, much like the KGB had placed moles inside foreign intelligence. One of those purported moles might have helped to launder as much as ten billion dollars at the Bank of New York. Finance, more than spies or armies, ruled today’s world. To combat the new threat, the FBI was now conducting sting operations. Unbeknownst to Monroe, Blackwell had been documenting his partner’s guilt for some time. Blackwell always knew Monroe would have to be sacrificed; it was just a matter of when. Blackwell had arranged for a field agent to take pictures of one of Monroe’s meetings with Ivan the Terrible not long before he ordered Jaeger to kill the Russian. Monroe had also been the perfect tie-in with the paparazzo. There were photographs of the two of them together on the oil rig. Travel records would show how their paths had crossed. Guilt by association.
Blackwell had known to cut bait when Proferov became a potential liability. The triumvirate of Monroe, Jaeger, and Blackwell had been a good partnership: money, muscle, and brains. But Blackwell always wanted more. Plundering Russia was like robbing a corpse. He wanted the combination to the world’s vault, and the power that went with it.
The vice president and the actress had fallen into his lap during Blackwell’s surveillance of a Russian mobster who owned a remote Maryland estate. To save man-hours, a camera trap had been set up to record all passing cars on the seldom traveled road. Tennesson and the actress, arriving in separate cars, had made the mistake of having an assignation at a property a half mile down the road from the mobster’s house. It wasn’t information that Blackwell could immediately use, but he knew ultimately it could be cultivated into something much more. The affair itself wouldn’t be enough of a bargaining chip. Clinton, Mark Sanford, and others had proved that having an affair was no longer political suicide. But the potential was there.
Just days after that revelation, while Blackwell was still mulling possibilities on how he could use his information, the paparazzo and the Citroën had fallen into his lap. Carey had called in a favor, asking Blackwell to get a duplicate Citroën in a hush-hush job that no one was to know about. Carey had said they would be doing the Agency a favor. It was possible Carey was covering up some extracurricular activities of his own, or maybe he was just being extremely loyal to both Thierry and his employer. It wasn’t an op the Agency could condone or even know about.
The need for secrecy in handling the Citroën served Blackwell’s purposes. The plan began to formulate in his mind. By knowing about the accident, he knew that he owned the paparazzo. Over time, he worked out the details. The brothers, posing as Mossad agents, had suckered the actress into thinking she had a duty and a cause. And the paparazzo and his muckraking had helped bring the politician and the actress even closer together. Their lust wasn’t enough to serve Blackwell’s purposes. What they needed was the ultimate bonding experience: covering up some terrible crime. The paparazzo’s own hit-and-run inspired the bicyclist scheme. He banked on the actress and the politician running from what they had done. Once they did so, there would be no going back. Blackwell figured the sharing of that secret would put the next president in his hip pocket.
Blackwell had enjoyed all the long-term planning. It really was a simple scheme. Do it any other way, and he would have needed a platoon to get through the Secret Service and get to the vice president. All he had to do was bring Tennesson to him. Lust was a powerful tool. Nothing else could have gotten to Tennesson but that. Stars have that aphrodisiac quality that politicians don’t seem to be able to ignore. Ask Jack Kennedy about Marilyn Monroe, or Bob Kerrey about Debra Winger, or Gary Hart about Donna Rice, or John Edwards about his affair and baby with Rielle Hunter.
Being a puppet master was eminently satisfying, and the actual expenses of the operation were minimal. Besides, the potential payoff of being the ultimate insider had promised to be extraordinary. A thousand things could have gone wrong. The opposition party could have presented Tennesson with a greater challenge. The ardor between the man who would be king and the Hollywood queen could have cooled. The actress could have refused to bite at the Mossad bait. Pilgrim could have called their bluff about exposing his involvement in the Paris accident. And when Byrne and Tennesson believed they had hit the bicyclist, they could have owned up to their accident.
Blackwell had gambled on human nature, betting on lust and fear. Everything worked beyond his wildest dreams. The hit-and-run went perfectly, giving Blackwell more than a bargaining chip; he had his Pennsylvania Avenue passport.
It was a terrible fluke that Pilgrim stumbled on the actress while she was committing suicide. Just to be safe, the brothers were still monitoring her. Her suicide would have been perfect. It was almost incomprehensible that the two Hollywood people Blackwell was manipulating, and keeping far apart, should have come together at such an unpropitious time.
They stood in the way of his Oval Office.
Years of work and planning had come off beautifully. Only after the fact was everything threatened. It was a good thing Blackwell believed in preparing for every contingency.
The paparazzo should have died a half-dozen times, but he had been unbelievably lucky. Luck had a way of changing, though. It was a shame Jaeger was dead. He had taken care of the dirty work, distancing Blackwell from any involvement. But for the right price, Blackwell knew there were mercenaries who would take on the assignment of killing the paparazzo with no questions asked. It would be a mercy killing really. The way Blackwell had arranged things, the paparazzo would end up rotting in prison. Maybe he should just let the man live. He was a loose end, but not truly consequential. Pilgrim would just be another prisoner protesting his innocence. That would hardly make him unique. His death might be investigated; alive, he would be ignored.
Blackwell’s musing was interrupted when three men entered his small office unannounced. Unbidden, he remembered the saying that trouble comes in threes. Their eyes were watchful, their faces a blank. No smiles, no greetings. For the first time in a very long while, Blackwell felt some uncertainty.
He knew one of the men: Drake. He was the assistant fucking director of DI, a self-important prick who had been promoted à la the Peter Principle because he was one of the boys.
“Gentlemen,” Blackwell said.
Drake took the lead. All business, he said, “Graham Wells.”
If they thought a name was going to bother Blackwell, they were wrong. “The name sounds familiar.”
“It should.”
Blackwell appeared to search his memory a little more. “The photographer?”
“The same. You said he joined Jefferson Monroe and Ivan Proferov during their Paris meeting.”
The meeting had taken place. There were photographs showing Monroe and Proferov talking. The only fiction was the paparazzo being there.
“Now I remember,” said Blackwell.
“And this occurred on August twenty-eighth at around one in the morning?”
“If that’s the da
te I noted in the report, yes.”
“How did you ID the photographer?”
“If I remember correctly, I heard Monroe introduce him to Proferov. I believe that’s in the report. In subsequent days I confirmed his identity.”
Blackwell actually had been at the table next to Monroe and Ivan the Terrible. Monroe, acting as his beard, had been under orders to ignore him. Monroe thought Blackwell was there for his protection. And Proferov, of course, had never known his identity. Another agent had been stationed outside. In his report, the second agent verified Blackwell’s proximity to what was going on. Arrange the corroborating evidence, and you could get away with anything.
“And because of that,” said Drake, “you put Wells on a low-level watch?”
“Some monitoring seemed to be in order.”
“But when I first said his name you seemed to have trouble recalling it.”
Blackwell attempted a tone of levity: “So many bad guys, so little time.”
“Wells claims he was never at that Paris meeting.”
“Should we be surprised?”
“You didn’t file your full report until almost a week after that meeting took place.”
Carey had called with the story about Thierry’s missing Citroën, and his fear that it was the mystery car struck by Le Croc. That kept Blackwell busy for several days.
“I usually take copious notes. It must have taken me a few days to put them together.”
He hoped helping Carey keep everything quiet would serve his own purposes. But unknown to Carey, Blackwell conducted his own investigation. The paparazzo had been indiscreet enough to sign in with the concierge at the Thierrys’ apartment. Jaeger tracked his movements out of Paris and arranged for a substitute Citroën. He even figured out where the paparazzo had dumped the original car and done a salvage operation. They hadn’t needed the car, but had needed certain items from it. Salvaging the car’s vehicle identification number—la plaque d’immatriculation—and a few substituted parts enabled them to make a perfect counterfeit. With a nationwide car hunt going on, they hadn’t wanted to chance a phony or stolen plaque d’immatriculation. The French VIN numbers are specific, numerically identifying area and district. Obtaining the original had been the finishing touch. Afterward, Jaeger had seen to the permanent disposal of the Citroën, dumping the car several miles farther offshore where no one would ever find it.
