Soul of the Assassin

by Larry Bond

  “They’re waiting,” said her secretary, Teri Gatins, as Corrine rushed into her office for the ten a.m. conference call. Corrine’s day had started with a phone conference at six; the half-filled cup of coffee she held in her hand was her breakfast.

  “Thanks,” said Corrine. She dropped her briefcase at the side of her desk, spun the chair around, and picked up the phone.

  CIA Deputy Director of Operations Daniel Slott was already talking.

  “It’s a theory. I don’t know if it’s a good one,” said Slott.

  “What’s that?” said Corrine.

  “I was just explaining that we have a theory about what T Rex is up to in Bologna.”

  “Hey, Counselor. How’s the weather at the White House?” said Bob Ferguson.

  “They say it may snow,” answered Corrine.

  “Gee wish I was there.”

  “Could you please recap the situation. Dan? What is the theory?” she asked.

  “A gas or other agent being dispersed in a public square,” said Slott. “T Rex’s advance person took measurements of three piazzas near the center of Bologna.”

  “Dispersing gas? T Rex is supposed to be an assassin. That sounds more like a terrorist attack.”

  “Admittedly,” answered Slott. “But it’s not that out of line for him. T Rex likes to kill.”

  Besides Slott and Ferguson, the commander of the First Team’s military force, Col. Charles Van Buren, was on the line, as was CIA Director Thomas Parnelles. Corrine had been appointed by the President to oversee Special Demands; while the members of the First Team still worked for either the CIA or the military, they answered to her as well. It was an awkward arrangement, intended by the President to give him tight control over the Special Operations force, while at the same time insulating him from it if something went wrong.

  “Has this T Rex character used gas to kill someone before?” asked Colonel Van Buren.

  “Everything but.” said Slott. “He’s used bombs, a mortar shell, a rifle, and at least twice a pistol from very close range.”

  Slott explained that the person they believed was T Rex’s preparer or advance man—actually a woman who was using the name Arna Kerr—had taken measurements of three piazzas in the center of the old city. From that, one of their analysts had deduced that the attacks would take place there. Kerr’s measurements were only necessary, said the analyst, if T Rex was planning to use a chemical gas; in that case, the killer would be considering how much gas to use to guarantee a kill. The size, wind pattern, and fact that the area was open argued strongly against an aerosol attack—in layman’s terms, the sort of attack that would be made with biological weapons—but a quick-acting chemical gas, laid on thickly enough, would be deadly. The analyst thought that the fact that the assassination would look like a terrorist attack was intentional, since it would divert attention from the actual intent of the crime.

  “We’re looking at two weeks as the outside end of the time frame,” said Slott, “because that’s how long she rented the vehicles for. But in the three assassinations we’ve connected her with, T Rex has shown up much sooner—within forty-eight hours.”

  “This is a wrong turn,” said Ferguson. “It doesn’t fit with T Rex.”

  “If you have another theory, I’m all ears,” said Slott.

  “A bomb I could see. But gas? Too many things left to chance.”

  “He doesn’t care how many people die as long as his target is one of them,” said Parnelles.

  “Yeah, but he does care that the target dies. Gas is too iffy for that. Too many variables.”

  “Why else would she take the measurements then?” asked Slott.

  “Maybe it’s for a bomb; maybe he’s going to use a sniper rifle; maybe T Rex just gives her a lot of things to do so she can’t figure out what’s up,” said Ferguson. “We don’t end up using half the intelligence you guys dig up for us.”

  While Slott defended the theory, Corrine considered the implications. If the attack was made in a public square, many people would be injured, if not killed.

  “We’re going to have to tell the Italians what’s going on,” said Corrine. “We’re going to have to tell them what we have.”

  “That will ruin everything,” said Parnelles.

  “If they had information about 9-11 and didn’t tell us, what would we think of them as allies?” Corrine said.

  “We can stop T Rex,” said Slott. “Right, Ferg?”

  “If we figure out who he is.”

  “The President is going to have to make the call,” said Corrine. “He has to have the final say here.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Corrine knocked on the door to the Oval Office and then went in, waiting while Pres. Jonathon McCarthy finished up a phone call with a congressman who was opposing McCarthy’s health-care reform package. The chief of staff, Fred Greenberg, stood near the desk, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his nervous energy a sharp contrast to the President’s laid-back country-boy expression.

  “Well,” said the President finally, drawing out the word in the overpronounced Southern style he liked to use when making a point. “I do hope you will consider my points, Congressman, just as seriously as I am going to consider yours. And you know I take them very seriously. . . . You have a good day yourself.”

  The President put the phone back on the hook.

  “I’ve owned mules that weren’t half as stubborn,” he said.

  “We’re sunk,” said Greenberg.

  “Now don’t go giving up the ship when we have only just spotted the iceberg,” said McCarthy. “We still have a few moments to steer the rudder and close the compartment doors. Wouldn’t you say so, Miss Alston?”

  “On a difficult issue like this, it may take some time to win over votes,” said Corrine. “Perhaps you should delay the vote.”

  “Spoken like a true lawyer, used to billing by the hour.” McCarthy laughed. “You have something you need me to address?”

  “Yes.” Corrine glanced at Greenberg.

  “I have to go answer a couple of e-mails,” said the chief of staff. “I’ll be right back.”

  When McCarthy and Corrine were alone, he folded his arms and leaned back in his chair.

  “We are going to lose this one, I’m afraid,” he told Corrine. “We just do not have the votes. But sometimes it’s important to keep the horse in the race.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What would you think of talking to Senator Segriff for me about this? He might be persuaded to come around. He is not an unreasonable man.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better coming from you?”

  “Sometimes a young filly can succeed where an old craggy nag will fail.”

  “So I’m a filly now, am I?”

  McCarthy laughed and sat upright in his chair. “Deah, if I offended you, well then, I am just going to have to apologize. I assure you that I do not think you are a horse, young or otherwise.”

  “I hope not.”

  “Now what is so important that my chief of staff has to answer his e-mail personally, which I believe he has not done in six or seven months.”

  “Italy and Special Demands.” Corrine gave him a brief summary of the phone conference.

  “If the assassin is planning an attack in a public square, we have to notify the Italians,” she told him. “We can’t let an attack like that go off without warning them to take steps. If the situation were reversed, we’d want blood.”

  McCarthy tore off the top page of the notepad he had on his desk and rose. “I don’t suppose Tom Parnelles likes the idea very much.”

  “He didn’t voice his opinion.”

  “That would be the answer right there, I suspect.” McCarthy crumpled the paper and tossed it into the basket.

  “Ferguson—the lead op on the First Team—is worried that if we bring the Italians in on it, we’ll tip off the assassin he’s supposed to capture,” said Corrine. “He argued against it.”

  “I’m sure Mr. Parnel
les and Mr. Ferguson are on the same page on this,” said McCarthy. “There is an argument to be made there.”

  “It’s overweighed. Think of a hundred people dying in Minnesota or Omaha because the Italians wanted to capture a person they thought killed one of their intelligence officers. We wouldn’t stand for it.”

  “No. We wouldn’t. This would make the rendition flap look like a Sunday school debate over the devil’s favorite lie.”

  Corrine nodded.

  “The Director feels personally responsible for his officer’s murder,” continued the President. “Do you remember the incident, Corrine? No, actually you wouldn’t, as it was just before you came on board,” said McCarthy, answering his own question. “You hadn’t joined the intelligence committee staff yet, had you? Well, Mr. Parnelles had just been appointed as chief of the CIA when his man died, and he took it almost as a personal insult. I believe the officer who was killed had had some association with him earlier as well. I believe he may have worked for him at one time, if memory serves.”

  “I think he feels responsible for his people,” said Corrine. “I think that’s natural.”

  “Yes, dear, that is natural, but you see, there are sometimes more important things to consider.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell the Italians. Find a way to do it while preserving our operation. And please, take care of this personally.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  McCarthy drummed his fingers on his desk. “The wording on the Iran finding—have you finished it?”

  “It’s ready,” she said, mentally changing gears. “We’re not on the strongest grounds, Jonathon.”

  “Hopefully we won’t need it. Secretary Steele continues to assure me that the Iranians are about to sign the treaty and give up their weapons, just as North Korea has done. It is a solution I much prefer. I just wish that the Secretary of State would get them to move with a little more alacrity.”

  Several weeks before, McCarthy had decided that the Iranian nuclear program had progressed to a point where it would have to be dealt with decisively. While his administration had been working behind the scenes to get the Iranians to abandon their program, Iran’s Sunni neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia and Egypt, had concluded that they needed nuclear weapons to counterbalance their traditional Shiite enemies and had secretly begun to work on a bomb together. If they developed one, McCarthy believed, the odds of nuclear war in the Middle East or of terrorists obtaining the weapons would be astronomical.

  The President had therefore decided to force the issue—he would offer aid to Iran and a full normalization of relations if they dropped the project. If they didn’t, he would destroy the infrastructure that supported it.

  Estimates by the CIA indicated that the program was still vulnerable to coordinated air strikes but would only remain so for a few more months; the President had set an internal deadline for an agreement at the end of the month, a week away. He’d asked Corrine to draw up a legal argument supporting a first strike. “Something a little more thoughtful than might makes right,” he’d said. McCarthy greatly preferred a peaceful settlement, since an attack would bring very serious and not necessarily predictable repercussions; nonetheless, a nuclear arms race in the Middle East was an even worse choice.

  “I can have the draft on your desk in an hour,” Corrine said.

  “No, no. I only want to make sure it’s ready.” Ever the poker player, McCarthy was thinking about using the finding as a way of forcing the Iranians to ante up—if they balked at Steele’s proposal, he’d have the finding leaked to convince them he meant business.

  And if that didn’t work, then he’d have no alternative but to go ahead with the attack.

  “Have you been following the situation in Iran?” McCarthy asked.

  “Not as closely as I should,” said Corrine. It was a defensive answer; she had actually been reading every report and briefing available.

  “There continues to be resistance to the agreement, especially among the Revolutionary Guard. Talk of a coup.”

  “No one seems to think that’s serious.”

  “Difficult to assess,” said McCarthy.

  He wasn’t sure himself how seriously to take the rumors. Iran and its myriad political players remained largely an enigma.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Miss Alston,” he said, glancing at his watch. “It appears I am running late for my next appointment.”

  Already out of her chair, Corrine followed him to the door. The President reached for the handle, then paused.

  “Your father was asking about you the other day, Corrine. He wanted to make sure you were getting your proper allotment of sleep. I told him you were, but I do not think he believed me.”

  “I’m getting plenty of sleep, Jonathon. He’s just—you know Dad.”

  “Longer than you.” McCarthy winked. “But perhaps we would do a better job of convincing him if the e-mails you sent to him did not bear time stamps indicating they were sent at three a.m. It weakens our case considerably, Counselor.”

  “Yes sir, Mr. President. I’ll try to remember.”

  2

  BOLOGNA, ITALY

  Ferguson took a walk alone around the block after the conference call ended, working off some steam. The gas theory was a crock. Worse, they’d drifted into decision-by-committee territory; he wasn’t supposed to do anything now until he heard from Corrine Alston.

  Undoubtedly, she’d convince the President to notify the Italians, who would probably go apeshit and shut the whole town down. There’d be some cockeyed arrangement with the First Team acting as “consultants” or some such crap. T Rex would be smirking somewhere in the shadows.

  Not only would he be tipped off here, but he’d realize that his operation had been compromised. If he was smart—and his track record suggested he was a genius—he’d tear it down and start from scratch. Arna Kerr would be out of work, and they’d spend years trying to find another lead.

  Ferguson stopped into a café, and after a quick shot of espresso—for some reason the caffeine calmed him down—got back to work. The first thing to do was check out the university buildings Arna Kerr had gone to. They’d already planted video bugs in the foyers; he was interested in something else, something less obvious. He hoped he’d realize what it was when he saw it.

  The art building was a large onetime mansion about a block off the Via Rizzoli. The place was being used as a temporary university building, but the choice was hardly haphazard. Though from the outside the building’s dull brown blocks and gray cornices were overshadowed by the bright bricks of its neighbors, inside the place was as ornate as any palace. The walls of the entrance hallway were covered with marble; baroque-era statues flanked the thick red carpet that brought students and visitors inside. A large double stairway made of marble sat at the far end; its bronze banister was inlaid with gold. On the ceiling above, a bright faux sky featured cherubim amid its puffy clouds.

  A security guard looked at Ferguson cross-eyed from a nearby archway as the op scouted around. Ferguson saw him and ambled over in his direction to ask, in English, if the man knew where Professore Pirelio’s classes were to be found. The guard told Ferguson in Italian that he was a security guard and not a member of the staff. Ferguson pretended not to understand and repeated the question. When he got roughly the same answer he thanked the guard profusely before walking past him into the main hallway.

  Even in the corridor, the building’s proportions gave it a regal feel. The walls had been recently restored and painted, their blue and gold pattern so vivid that it seemed to glow. The hall opened into another wide reception area, this one just as ornate as the one near the front entrance. A set of arched doorways led to a room decorated with late-Renaissance frescoes that ran all the way to the ceiling three stories above. Rather than a faux sky, the ceiling was covered in panels of what looked like gold leaf. It was actually a relatively new coat of paint, carefully applied within the lines of the original pa
per-thin panels; the genuine gold had been replaced sometime during the nineteenth century, when the owners had fallen on hard times.

  Large carts of chairs were being wheeled into the room, and a crew was setting up a stage to the right. Ferguson wandered over and asked two of the workers what they were setting up for.

  “They never tell us,” said one of the men.

  “Oh, I know what it’s for,” said another. “The genetics conference. Frankenstein will be here.”

  The man, an art student in his early twenties who moon-lighted as a roustabout to support himself, began a diatribe about genetic mutation and man’s inevitable decline. A large number of scientists from across the world were gathering to talk about using bacteria for man’s good, said the student. It was clearly a disaster in the making.

  “I thought this was an art school,” said Ferguson.

  The young man, himself an art student, sensed an ally, and gave Ferg a long diatribe in response, claiming that the school and the country were not serious about supporting its artists. His coworker rolled his eyes and went back to work.

  “And the conference starts tonight?” asked Ferguson.

  “There’s a brochure on the bulletin board in the second-floor lounge,” said the student. He saw his supervisor coming and decided to get back to work. “Read it, brother,” he said, walking away. “You’ll be surprised what they’re up to. Frankenstein in a test tube.”

  3

  CIA BUILDING 24-442

  When Jack Corrigan had first been offered the position with Special Demands, he’d seen it as a shortcut in his overall plan to advance to the upper levels of the intelligence establishment, where he hoped to become the boss of either the Defense Information Agency—his preference—or the CIA itself. He still thought Special Demands was a wise career move, but now realized it was not without its thorns.