by Jake Needham
Within minutes, he was fast asleep.
Tay emerged from sleep like a man crawling out of a cave. At first, he had no idea where he was, of course, and he lay without moving and prodded his memory to provide him with some explanation of his situation. Slowly images began to bubble up from the depths of his recollection, slide around in his mind, and assemble themselves like an animated jigsaw puzzle. The soldiers appearing at his hotel room door in the middle of the night, the helicopter ride to some airport, the private jet flight with August and the others, and the black SUVs that brought them to this house which August had said was somewhere near Washington D.C.
Once Tay had satisfactorily established his relationship to his surroundings, he got up and showered and used the toothbrush and shaving gear he found in the bathroom. While he shaved, he inspected himself critically in the mirror as he often did. His eyes were clear, probably the beneficiaries of a decent night’s sleep, but he thought the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes had attained a new state of prominence. Was that because of the mad dash from Thailand through Japan and on to Washington, or was he just getting old? Of course, he was getting old, but he was beginning to think he was getting old at a faster rate these days. That was what gave him pause.
When he was done, he dressed in the only clean clothes he had left in his bag, opened the door, and stepped out into the hallway. Almost immediately he smelled the aroma of fresh coffee and heard the murmur of voices from somewhere downstairs. The voices were too faint for him to recognize any of them, but he really didn't care who it was. If it was somebody who had coffee, that's where he was going.
When Tay followed the smell to the kitchen he found August, Claire, and Woods gathered around a big wooden table with a fourth man he didn’t know.
The first thing he noticed was that Claire looked good, really good. She was wearing black jeans tucked into high black boots and a man’s white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Tay wasn’t absolutely sure whether he was even allowed to notice a woman’s appearance these days. Americans had been getting goofier and goofier about that sort of thing the last few years and he had the impression that just thinking a woman looked attractive now amounted to a felony in America.
So arrest me, Tay thought to himself, but he only nodded at Claire. Just to be on the safe side, he wasn’t about to mention her appearance one way or another.
The woman who had shown him up to his room last night was clearing away plates and pouring more coffee.
“How do you take your coffee, sir?” she asked him.
“Black and soon.”
“Sleep well, Sam?” August asked.
Tay nodded.
“I guess you did. I thought I was going to have to come upstairs and tickle your feet to get you up.”
“You need to remember that I’ve got a gun.”
Nobody laughed. Maybe they thought he was serious.
Then he remembered he was serious. The gun Mad Max had given him was still tucked into the bottom of his bag. Was having a gun in America legal? Tay’s general impression was that it might even be mandatory.
“What time is it here?” Tay asked. “My watch is still on some other time zone.”
“A little after nine.”
Tay started to work out the time change between what his watch said and what August was telling him, but he quickly decided that wasn’t going to happen before he’d had coffee so he just reset his watch and let it go. He was where he was and the time was what it was. There was nothing he could do about either.
The woman returned and placed a mug of black coffee in front of an empty place at the table. The aroma began to pump new life into him even before he had his first sip.
That’s the ticket, Tay thought as he sat down and savored his first sips. Take it slow and drink coffee.
“Sam,” August said, “I’d like you to meet the Conductor.”
It was all Tay could do not to laugh out loud. This code name stuff was like a bunch of children playing in a treehouse. The man Tay didn’t know half rose from his seat and offered his hand. Tay shook it.
“So, you’re the famous Inspector Tay,” the Conductor said.
“I’m retired. It’s just plain Samuel Tay now.”
Tay thought the Conductor was an unremarkable looking man and guessed he was somewhere around seventy. He looked like a small-town grocer or the man who ran the drug store. He could be anybody. Maybe that was the occupational qualification a spy needed in order to achieve his sort of longevity.
The woman who had served Tay his coffee stood next to his chair with her hands folded in front of her. “Would you like some breakfast, sir?”
All at once Tay realized how hungry he was.
“What do you have?”
“Fruit, muffins, Danish pastry, bagels, toast, cereal of all sorts, and of course I can prepare eggs and bacon for you.”
“Ah…” Tay thought for a moment. “Fruit and maybe some scrambled eggs on toast?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“More coffee?”
“Absolutely.”
“Disgustingly healthy, Sam,” August put in. “You’re in America now. You ought to have a bowl of Fruit Loops in honor of the occasion.”
Tay had no idea what Fruit Loops were so he said nothing.
The woman came back to refill Tay’s coffee cup. When she left to prepare Tay’s eggs and toast, the Conductor cleared his throat.
“Thank you for coming to help us, Sam.”
“I don’t really deserve any credit. I was more or less kidnapped.”
“Nevertheless, you have already performed a great service for us. If you hadn’t identified the messenger, we wouldn’t have anything at all to work with.”
“It wasn’t very hard. John could have done it himself.”
“Not and stay dead,” August pointed out.
Tay didn’t argue. He just drank some more coffee, then looked at the Conductor and said, “Can I ask you something?”
The Conductor nodded.
“Why am I here?”
“We need your help to find out who is trying to kill our people.”
“You must have people more qualified to do that than I am. I know nothing about your business, and I don’t want to.”
“I understand that.”
“I don’t even know anything about Washington. I’m not the guy you need to ask to do this.”
“Possibly not, but you’re John’s choice because he trusts you. And that counts for more than a working knowledge of the geography of Washington D.C.”
Tay wasn’t sure what to say to that so he did what he usually did when confronted by something that didn’t make much sense to him. He said nothing, drank a little coffee, and waited for someone to tell him what was really going on here.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“Rebecca Sternwood is part of something the Agency calls the East Asian Mission Center,” August explained to Tay.
“Part of?”
“She’s the DAD.”
“Do you people consciously use acronyms as a torture technique, or is it that you just can’t help yourselves?”
“She’s the Deputy Assistant Director. Of the East Asian Mission Center.”
“That sounds pretty high up.”
“It’s an upper middle position in the bureaucracy,” the Conductor put in. “The Agency has a lot of divisions and mission centers and task forces, and most of them have a director and an assistant director and several deputy assistant directors.”
“So, you’re telling me she’s not a senior official, but she’s not exactly a foot soldier either.”
“That’s right,” the Conductor said. “Think of her as a Master Sergeant. Just the level of person you’d get to run an operation that’s important, but one that you want to be able to disown if it turns to crap.”
“Then this really was a CIA operation. It was the CIA that planted that bomb in Hong Kong.”
“No,” the Conductor shook his head.
“We’re certain it wasn’t an official op.”
“I don’t understand that. This woman obviously had help setting up the attack in Hong Kong. She didn’t do it on her weekend off. She didn’t build a bomb and plant it in that hotel all by herself. She’s either part of an operation being run by the CIA, or she’s running an operation for the CIA. Which is it?”
“We don’t think it was either,” August said.
“Get real, John. You can’t be certain this wasn’t an official operation of the CIA.”
“It simply doesn’t make any sense that—”
“No, you’re right, we’re not certain,” the Conductor interrupted. “We don’t think it was a sanctioned operation, but we can’t be absolutely certain.”
“How are you going to find out?”
The Conductor cleared his throat. “I thought you might do that for us, Sam.”
The woman preparing their breakfast returned with Tay’s scrambled eggs on toast just then. The timing couldn’t have been better, at least from Tay’s point of view. He picked up his knife and fork, attacked his eggs, and waited to see where this was all going.
“Look, Sam,” August said. “This wasn’t an attack on me. It was an attack on the Band. Somebody wants to put us out of business.”
“I thought almost nobody knew the Band existed.”
“They don’t. But more people know I exist, and they can guess that I’m connected to some organization even if they don’t know exactly what it is.”
Tay chewed thoughtfully on his eggs and considered that.
“Tell me why somebody might come after the Band,” he said after a moment.
“It’s easy to imagine a lot of reasons.”
“Such as?”
“Revenge against us for something we did. Bureaucratic jealousy. It could be anything. We don’t know enough yet to guess at the real reason.”
“You don’t know very much, do you?”
“Maybe not, but there are really only three possibilities.”
August held up three fingers as if Tay might not be familiar with the number.
“The first is that this really was an op officially run by the Agency to shut down the Band, in which case I don’t even want to think about where that goes. The second is that this woman is acting essentially on her own for some reason and has gathered up a few other people she can rely on for help in targeting either me or the Band. And the third is that this woman was acting under instructions from someone higher up in the Agency in an op that was not officially sanctioned but which she probably thought was.”
“And which of those three possibilities do you think is more likely?”
“The third one,” the Conductor said. “She was following instructions from someone higher up.”
“How much higher up?” Tay asked.
The Conductor just looked at him.
“That high up, huh?” Tay muttered, finishing the last bite of his eggs and pushing his plate aside.
“She’s the only string we’ve got to pull on here, Sam. Whether she’s the head of the snake or just a piece somewhere in the middle doesn’t really matter. She’s still the only way into this.”
“So, what do you have in mind? Calling her up and asking her why she set John and the others up to be killed?”
“Not exactly. We’re going to scare her.”
“Scare her?”
“We’re going to scare the unholy fuck out of her. If she’s in this with somebody else, she’ll run straight to them. If she’s doing this on her own, she will come back against us. Either way, we’ll find out what this is all about.”
“I assume you’ve concocted some cockamamie plan for how you’re going to go about doing that.”
Neither the Conductor nor August said anything. The Conductor was expressionless, but August looked at Tay with a half-smile on his face.
“Why do I get the feeling I don’t really want to hear this part?” Tay sighed.
The Conductor shuffled through some files that were stacked in front of him and came up with a flat manila envelope about the size of a hardback book. He pushed it across the table to Tay.
“For you,” he said.
Tay opened the envelope and dumped out the contents. A black passport booklet with silver embossing, and a slim black leather folder that appeared scratched and scarred from use.
Tay picked up the passport and looked at the cover. At the top, in both English and Arabic script, it said INTERPOL with the Interpol logo right below, and following that was the word for passport in four languages: English, French, Spanish, and Arabic. Inside the front cover was a page that said International Criminal Police Organization in the same four languages, and below that was Tay’s picture, his description, his place of birth, and his job title. Criminal Intelligence Officer.
Tay opened the leather folder, but he already knew what he would find. It was a badge case. On the right side of the folder was a gold badge that said INTERPOL OFFICER and on the left was an identification card with his picture that identified him as a Criminal Intelligence Officer. It looked a lot like Tay’s Singapore warrant card.
“I won’t even bother to ask where you got the photos,” Tay said.
Nobody said anything, but then Tay really hadn’t expected them to.
“Are these legitimate Interpol credentials?” he asked.
“We got them from a movie prop house in New York and stuck your photos in,” August said.
“Seriously?”
“Of course not, Sam. They’re real. We’re not total idiots.”
The woman who had been serving them breakfast had disappeared so Tay stood up, took his cup over to the coffee maker, and refilled it himself.
“Anybody else?” he asked before he returned the pot to the warming plate.
“I wouldn’t mind some,” Claire said.
Tay walked over with the glass carafe and refilled her cup. It was the first time Claire had spoken since Tay had come into the kitchen, and Woods had yet to say a single word. He assumed that reflected the pecking order. The Conductor was the boss, August was the underboss, and Woods and Claire were the soldiers. Tay wondered what that made him. He returned the carafe to the warming plate and sat back down with his fresh cup of coffee.
“This is your big plan? I tell this woman that Interpol is investigating her and she goes limp and tells me everything. Seriously?”
“I’m sure this woman has never dealt with anyone from Interpol in her whole life,” August said. “When you suddenly show up and start asking questions about Hong Kong, it will be a total ambush. She’ll freak out.”
“For God’s sake, John, she’s a CIA officer. She’s not going to go all gaga just because someone tells her he’s from Interpol and starts asking her questions. She’ll just smile at me and say she knows nothing about it.”
“Look at it from her point of view. Whether she set the bomb herself or not—”
“Almost certainly she didn’t,” Tay interrupted.
“I doubt she did either, but she sent us there. She was still at least partly responsible for a bombing in Hong Kong that did extensive damage to the Cordis Hotel and killed three people.”
“But the three of you aren’t actually dead.”
“Three bodies were found in the rubble,” the Conductor said. “I have no idea who they were, but Rebecca and whoever she’s connected with are naturally assuming they were John, Claire, and Woods. So, there are three people dead, even if it’s the wrong three people.”
“Depending on how you want to define who the wrong three people are,” August added.
“Yes,” the Conductor nodded. “Depending on that.”
“When Interpol come sniffing around, Sam,” August said, tapping his finger on the table, “and tells this woman they know she’s responsible for three deaths, she’s going to panic. China would love nothing more than to publicly out a CIA officer for murdering three people. She’s not going to want to be the scapegoat here.”
; “What if she doesn’t panic?”
“She will. She’s a CIA bureaucrat, and I know bureaucrats. When something goes wrong, they spread the blame around as quickly as they can. You can make book on it.”
“So, I just stroll into CIA headquarters, flash these fake Interpol credentials, and push my way into her office?”
“Don’t be silly.”
The Conductor dipped back into the files he had stacked in front of him and came up with two sheets of plain white paper. He pulled them out and slid them across the table to Tay.
“We’ve developed some background on Miss Sternwood and have a sense of what her daily routine is like. Using that information, we want you to watch her for a while and find a way to approach her when she is outside her office, someplace where she is alone and vulnerable.”
“You mean at home?”
“Maybe, but maybe somewhere else. That’s up to you. You find the place she would least expect to be approached, introduce yourself as an Interpol investigator, and tell her you’ve connected her to the Hong Kong bombing.”
Tay looked down at the pieces of paper on the table in front of him. On the top sheet, he saw Rebecca Sternwood’s office address. It was in someplace called Crystal City. Probably a Washington suburb. It was an enticing name for a suburb, but Tay suspected Crystal City sounded a lot more interesting than it would actually turn out to be.
Her home address was there, too, and a description of her living arrangements. Single, living alone, no cats or dogs. There was even a description of her car and its license number. But what really stopped him was the detailed log of her activities for the last three days.
“Where did you get all this?” Tay asked while he was still reading.
No one answered him and he glanced up at August.
“Does the Band have spies at the CIA, John?”
August said nothing.
The Conductor cleared his throat. “I’d prefer to call them friends.”
“Whatever you call them, it looks to me like the same thing. The Band is spying on the CIA.”
“I suppose you can look at it that way. If you want to.”
