And Brother It's Starting to Rain

by Jake Needham

  “And you think her instructions came from this Zac Reed fellow?”

  “Not likely. He has no operational responsibility.”

  “You lost me. So how does that help us?”

  “August and the Conductor think the orders probably came from the man Zac Reed works for. He’s the executive assistant to someone much higher up who would be able to set an operation like this in motion.”

  “How high up?”

  Rebecca lifted her forefinger and pointed to the sky. “Way, way high up, Sam.”

  Tay waited.

  “Zac Reed is the Executive Assistant to the DCI,” she said after a moment.

  “I don’t know what that means. Do you people ever speak in actual words instead of using acronyms for everything?”

  “DCI stands for Director Central Intelligence.”

  “The Director?”

  Claire nodded tightly.

  “Of the whole damn Central Intelligence Agency?”

  Claire nodded again.

  “You’re telling me August thinks the orders to kill all of you came from the fucking Director of the fucking Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

  Tay exhaled slowly between his teeth.

  “Oh shit,” he muttered.

  “Yes,” Claire said. “Exactly.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Rebecca thought it would be hard to imagine anyone more out of place walking through the woods of Fort Marcy Park than Zac Reed. In his gray suit, white shirt, striped tie, and brown wingtips, he looked exactly like half the briefcase-carrying lawyers you encountered on K Street almost every day in Washington. But these woods were a long way from being K Street, and Reed was a long way from being just another workaday lawyer.

  He wasn’t a large man, nor was he particularly small. His very ordinariness was perhaps his most outstanding personal characteristic. The only really memorable thing about Zac Reed was his eyes. His eyes were bright blue, a cold metallic blue, and they moved in sharp, quick jerks like a bird’s, darting from one thing to another, then coming back to you again. Those restless, unfeeling eyes gave him something of a menacing quality. They were a reminder to Rebecca to stay wary and not to be deceived by his otherwise bland appearance.

  Reed led the way along a pine-needle covered path that wound deep inside the park and Rebecca followed a pace behind his right shoulder. It had rained in the night and the damp straw gave off a rich, organic odor that reminded Rebecca of the mulch her father collected in a huge pile at the end of their garden back when she had been a child. It was a smell she had always thought took birth and decay together in equal parts and somehow combined it into a single aroma. It had always held a soothing quality for her.

  The straw was also slick in spots. When the path tilted down a slight slope toward the river, one of Rebecca’s feet slipped and instinctively she reached out and grabbed Reed’s shoulder to catch her balance.

  He stopped walking and turned his head toward her, and his eyes darted around on her face in such a way that she felt like she was being pecked at by a sparrow. His face twisted into something that was almost a smile, but his blue eyes glinted like ice. Off somewhere in front of them the river made a throbbing sound as it surged through the gorge below on its way to the Atlantic. It sounded to Rebecca like it would wash away all her sins if only she could reach it in time, but she knew she couldn’t.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I slipped.”

  Reed turned away without a word and continued walking.

  “Okay, I’m here,” he said without looking back. “What’s this all about?”

  “It’s about life without parole in a Chinese prison.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Do they even have parole in China? Maybe they’ll just shoot us.”

  “What in the world are you talking about, Rebecca?”

  “Interpol has connected me to the bomb at the Cordis Hotel in Hong Kong.”

  Abruptly, Reed stopped walking and turned around.

  “What the fuck do you mean by that?” he snapped. “That’s not funny.”

  “No,” she said, “it’s not.”

  The sound of the river off in the distance was so peaceful that she didn’t want to ruin it by telling Reed what had happened and she briefly considered not doing so, but she knew that was ridiculous. She took a deep breath.

  “An investigator from Interpol contacted me this morning. He said they have connected me to the Hong Kong bombing. He wanted to know if it was an Agency operation.”

  “What? Some Interpol cop came to your office?”

  “No, actually he walked up to my table when I was having breakfast at the IHOP in Arlington this morning and sat down. He introduced himself and then he asked me if the bombing was an Agency operation.”

  Rebecca leaned toward Reed and tapped her index finger on his chest.

  “He knows where I have breakfast, Zac. If he knows that, can you imagine what else he must know?”

  Reed looked so stricken Rebecca wondered for a moment if he was going to faint right there in Fort Marcy Park. She glanced around and saw a picnic table just off to the side of the path and about thirty feet away.

  “Let’s sit down,” she said, taking him by the elbow and steering him toward the table.

  The picnic table looked old and weathered enough to have been there when Fort Marcy was still fighting the Civil War. It had once been green, or something close to it, but only a few stubborn flakes of paint still clung tenaciously to the table top and the two wooden benches attached to it.

  Not far from the table an iron cannon on two wooden wheels sat all by itself among piles of leaves and pine straw whipped up by the wind. Presumably it had once fought battles during the Civil War and its barrel had showered fire and fury on those at whom it had been pointed. But that was a long time ago. Now it just looked forlorn and abandoned. Rebecca knew just how it felt.

  “Tell me everything,” Reed said when they were both seated at the picnic table.

  “He said his name was Tay. I think he was a Singaporean. He wasn’t a very impressive man. Quiet, polite, even diffident. His credentials said he was an inspector in Interpol, whatever that means.”

  “And he knew you work for the Agency?”

  Rebecca nodded.

  “Did he say how he knew?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “That’s a little frightening.”

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it?”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “He asked me if I had heard about the explosion at the Cordis Hotel in Hong Kong and I told him that I might have heard something about it. That was when he asked me if I had any responsibility for the Agency’s activities in Hong Kong. I told him that I was certain he knew I wasn’t going to answer that.”

  Reed watched her intently, but he didn’t interrupt.

  “Then this man said he knew the explosion had been caused by a bomb and that the bomb had been placed in room 1121 of the Cordis Hotel. He asked me if the bomb was an Agency operation.”

  “What room was the—”

  “1121.”

  “Good Lord,” Reed said, shaking his head.

  They both sat quietly for a while after that. Reed just looked off into the forest and Rebecca knew he was working through the implications of what she had told him. Rebecca didn’t bother working them through. She had already thought quite enough about what Tay’s sudden appearance might mean to her, so she just sat and listened to the roar of the river.

  All at once, Reed turned his head and those metallic blue eyes fixed her with a merciless stare. “Did you go to Hong Kong without telling me?”

  “No. I haven’t been in Hong Kong in more than a year.”

  “Then how did this man connect you with…” Reed hesitated, looking for the right word. “…the explosion,” he finished quickly.

  “You can call it a bombing, Zac. That’s what it was. I think we�
��re way past euphemism here.”

  “Stop worrying about what I’m calling it, Rebecca. Just tell me how he connected you to it.”

  Rebecca leaned back and folded her arms. She realized she was rather enjoying this in spite of everything. Maybe she just liked having Zac hanging on her every word.

  “Well, that’s really rather interesting. He said they had me on surveillance video.”

  “I don’t understand. Didn’t you just tell me you weren’t in Hong Kong?”

  “That’s right. I wasn’t. The surveillance video he says he has of me is from the Pattaya Hilton. That’s where I stayed when I went to August’s bar in Thailand pretending to be a messenger from the Band. That was when I sent him to Hong Kong.”

  Rebecca stifled a smile as she watched Reed’s mouth slowly open.

  “Good Lord,” he said again. “How in God’s name could he ever have been looking for you on surveillance video at a Hilton in Thailand?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that and it seems to me obvious someone told him a woman met with August in Pattaya a couple of days before August and his people went to Hong Kong. Tay probably didn’t have a name, just a description, and that’s why he was looking through surveillance tapes. He was trying to find a woman who matched the description.”

  “But what good would that do him? Don’t tell me you were registered under—”

  “Zac, I’m not a fool. Of course, I wasn’t registered under my own name.”

  “Then I still don’t get it. Even if he was able to find you and find the name you were registered under, how did that lead them to you here in Washington?”

  “Because he had my picture from the surveillance tape, Zac. And somebody recognized that picture and told him who I am.”

  “But who could have—”

  “Think, for God’s sakes, Zac. It must have been August who gave Tay my description. It couldn’t have been anybody else. And then when Tay found me on the surveillance tape and August confirmed that it was me, August must have used his own resources to identify me. It couldn’t have been that hard for him.”

  “But none of that could actually have happened. August is dead.”

  “Obviously, he isn’t.”

  “Rebecca, that’s ridiculous. Three bodies were recovered. August and the two members of his team he took with him.”

  “Did you confirm the identities of the bodies with Hong Kong Station?”

  “No, of course I didn’t. The last thing I wanted to do was leave a trail between Langley and what happened in Hong Kong.”

  “Why can’t you just say it clearly, Zac? It’s not something that happened in Hong Kong. It’s the bomb that we set in Hong Kong. A bomb that we set for the purpose of killing people. Say it.”

  Reed looked away and said nothing.

  “You can’t, can you, Zac. People like you never can. You sit in your nice clean office and you move papers around with your nice clean hands and you talk on the phone while people like me do your dirty work for you.”

  Reed looked back at her and his blue eyes darted around her face, but he still said nothing.

  “If you had thought hard about it, Zac, surely you could have found some pretext to use to inquire of the station. It would have been a useful thing for you to do because you would have found out something very interesting. Three bodies were recovered, that’s true, but they weren’t the bodies of August and his people. I did check with Hong Kong Station. The three bodies that were recovered were all Chinese women.”

  “Chinese women?” Reed repeated pointlessly.

  “Yes, Chinese women. Not August and not any of his people. August is alive. That’s how Interpol knew I was in Thailand and that’s how they found out who I am.”

  Zac Reed pushed himself up from the bench of the picnic table. He moved slowly, like an old man feeling the pain of his arthritis, and walked away down the path toward the river. Rebecca, not knowing what else to do, stood up and followed.

  After a moment she caught up with him and, keeping her voice low in spite of there being no one anywhere around, asked, “Why did you tell me to do this, Zac?”

  Reed looked at her for a moment as if he had no idea what she was talking about, so she tried it another way.

  “The story you gave me about August and his people going rogue was pure bullshit, wasn’t it? Why did the Agency really want August and his people killed?”

  “The Band had to be shut down, Rebecca.”

  “So, get somebody to shut it down. It’s like any other part of the government, isn’t it? Somebody has power over it. Somebody started it. Somebody could have stopped it. You didn’t have to murder people to do that.”

  “It’s an organization that’s out of control. It’s developed a life of its own and has to be pulled up by the roots. It’s become a threat.”

  “A threat to what?”

  “To national security, of course.”

  “A threat to national security or a threat to the Agency?”

  Reed offered a tiny shrug. “Same thing. More or less.”

  “So, your solution was to start killing the people who worked for the Band.”

  “It wasn’t my solution. It was…”

  Reed abruptly stopped talking.

  “Never mind, Rebecca. I’m not really prepared to discuss any of this with you. It’s above your pay grade.”

  “But you were prepared to ask me to arrange to kill them. I guess my pay grade covers murder.”

  Reed shot her a sharp look, but he didn’t say anything else. He just walked on and Rebecca walked with him.

  After a few minutes he stopped walking and looked back over his shoulder toward the parking lot, then ahead toward the river again. He appeared to Rebecca almost like he was searching for a particular location in the park, but she couldn’t imagine what it could be.

  They walked on, still not talking, and eventually Reed left the path and crossed over open ground to a slight rise covered in pine needles that was just in front of a line of three trees. There was a lovely view from there. Tree-covered slopes rolled down to a narrow granite gorge through which the Potomac River raced for two or three hundred yards spinning itself into plumes of foam and white water until the gorge opened up downriver as abruptly as it had begun and the river turned wide and lazy again.

  “What are you going to do now?” Reed suddenly asked.

  Rebecca noticed he wasn’t looking at her.

  “What am I going to do? I’ve already done my part here, Zac. What happens now is that you are going to fix this. Three innocent people are dead. They can charge us with murder if they want to. I am not going down alone for this.”

  “Don’t threaten me, sweetie. You’re not capable of backing it up.”

  “Call me sweetie one more time, you smarmy fuck, and you’ll see what I’m capable of.”

  Reed slowly turned his head toward Rebecca and looked at her with empty eyes. She stared right back. After a moment he chuckled and raised both hands, palms out, in the age-old gesture of conciliation.

  “Did you know that this is where they found Vince Foster?” Reed suddenly asked. “His body was right there.”

  He pointed to the pine-straw covered slope in front of the line of trees.

  “What are you talking about? Who’s Vince Foster?”

  “You don’t know who Vince Foster was, Rebecca? Really? I guess I forget how young you are.”

  She shook her head.

  “He was a pal of the Clintons. He came here with them from Arkansas when Bill Clinton was elected President. He worked in the White House and built a reputation as a fixer for the Clintons. Some say he was responsible for killing off the Whitewater investigation and burying Travelgate, both scandals that threatened Hillary Clinton with felony charges. You know about that, don’t you?”

  Rebecca wasn’t certain she did. It all sounded vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t remember why. Bill Clinton was well before her time.

  “Foster left his car about whe
re we parked,” Reed continued. “Then he walked in here, almost all the way to the river, and stretched out on the ground right over there.”

  Reed pointed again to the same spot.

  “He shot himself once in the mouth with an old revolver that used to belong to his father. Or so they say.”

  Reed walked over to the slope and knelt down. He placed his palm gently against the pine straw as if he could feel the vibration of the past in it.

  “Some people think Foster committed suicide because he knew too much about what Hillary Clinton had actually done and he was afraid he would be hounded by her enemies until he admitted what he knew. Other people think Foster didn’t commit suicide at all. They think the Clintons had him murdered and the body was dumped here to make it look like a suicide.”

  Reed’s eyes went to her face and Rebecca felt a chill go through her body.

  “Either way, Vince Foster died for more or less the same reason. It wasn’t about what he did. It was about what he knew.”

  In that moment they both went so still that Rebecca could swear she could feel the earth rotating beneath her feet.

  “What do you think, Rebecca? Did Vince Foster kill himself or did the Clintons have him killed to be certain he would never talk?”

  “How would I know?”

  Rebecca had tried hard to keep her voice flat, but she could hear the squeak in it and she knew she had failed.

  Reed smiled and looked away.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Meetings. You know how it is.”

  “Why did you tell me that, Zac?”

  “About the meetings?”

  “About Vince Foster. Is there supposed to be some kind of a lesson for me in that story?”

  “I just thought you would find it interesting, Rebecca. In Washington the past is always all around us. This is a city of ghosts. They’re everywhere. Even lying on a pile of pine straw out here in the woods.”

  “Fuck you, Zac.”

  Zac Reed bobbed his head slightly.

  “Yeah, fuck me.”

  Reed didn’t say anything else. He just turned away and started back to the parking lot.