Vineyard Prey

by Philip R. Craig

  I thought of the ancient joke about government intelligence being an oxymoron.

  I then went to official government websites and read that the United States intelligence community (known by the cognoscenti as “the CI”) was currently defined by Executive Order 12333, and that it included dozens of separate agencies that employed tens of thousands of people, most of whom were doing pretty straightforward office work but some of whom were doing other, undescribed jobs.

  I found and read Executive Order 12333. It was fourteen pages of small print and though most of it was mundane, some parts were more interesting. Paragraph 2.11, for example, prohibited IC personnel or others acting on behalf of the U.S. government from engaging in, or conspiring to engage in, assassination.

  I wondered how the actions of Joe Begay’s trade mission meshed with that directive. Not too well, at first glance, but maybe he and his associates had just helped some other anti-Bunny group to do the actual dirty work.

  Paragraph 2.12, however, seemed to forbid any IC agency from participating or requesting any person to undertake activities forbidden by this order.

  Hmmmm.

  I came to paragraph 3.4(h), which defined “special activities.” The definition of these was “activities conducted in support of national foreign policy objectives abroad which are planned and executed so that the role of the United States Government is not apparent or acknowledged publicly, and functions in support of such activities.”

  Hmmmm, again. An official provision that allowed the CI to do stuff they didn’t want the public to know about. No surprise there, if you remembered CIA activities in Central and South America. And Joe’s trade mission also fit the description of a special activity. Whenever official agencies don’t want you to know what they do, you should probably get a clothespin for your nose.

  The prohibition against assassination seemed to have been ignored more than once by the IC, and since Sam had died in my yard, I had a personal interest in violence involving the DIA.

  I exited from Executive Order 12333 and after a couple of stumbles through the Web discovered a site that informed me that back in 2001, efforts had been made in Congress to eliminate the prohibition against assassinations. A House resolution that became known as the Terrorist Elimination Act would have legalized political assassinations by the CI. I couldn’t find any confirmation that the resolution had passed, but I also couldn’t find any that it hadn’t.

  Interestinger and interestinger. Zee’s fears were apparently not wide of the mark. We were doing the same bad things the bad guys were doing to us. From some recess in my brain I drew a memory of an early American intelligence official who was even more naive than I was. He was said to have been furious when he discovered that efforts were being made to break another country’s codes and to have exclaimed, “Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail!” There were probably not too many gentlemen in the CI these days, and it was probably a good thing.

  I was glad I’d gotten out of the Boston PD when I did. Peacekeeping was a rough business and seemed to be getting rougher.

  The Homeland Security Act came to mind, so I checked that out. The document was so long that I wondered if anyone had actually read it all. Certainly I didn’t. I did note a few things, however. The paragraph headed “Construction: Severability” seemed to say that if any provision of the act should be held to be invalid or unenforceable, it should nevertheless be construed so as to give it maximum effect permitted by law, unless it was utterly invalid or unenforceable, in which case it should be omitted from the act.

  Either this concept was murky or my brain was. Maybe both. I skimmed on down through pages of governmentese before giving up and calling it quits. Someone once said that one requirement of research was a love of drudgery. My talent in the field was obviously thin.

  One thing was clear, though: the Homeland Security Department was a gigantic bureaucracy at least the equal in size and power of the incredibly huge CI. No wonder people who perceived themselves as humanists and defenders of civil liberties and open government were getting nervous. But then, such people have always been nervous Nellies, according to their critics.

  Come back, Cassandra! I’ll believe you this time in spite of the gods!

  But neither Cassandra nor Maat appeared, so I got off the Net and phoned Joe Begay.

  12

  “Something’s happened that might interest you,” I said when he answered his cell phone. “I’m coming over.”

  I hung up before he could say no, got into the Land Cruiser, and drove to Aquinnah. Two trips in one day. I seemed to be spending a lot of time there lately. The woods were mostly bare-branched trees, and the few leaves that remained on them and covered the ground beneath them were the color of metal: gold, copper, bronze, and rusted iron. The sky looked cold.

  No one seemed to be following me but, just in case I was wrong, when I got to Aquinnah I took Lobsterville Road, then cut right onto Lighthouse Road and pulled over to the side. Nobody came around the corner behind me, so I went on to Uncle Bill’s house.

  Uncle Bill’s old Ford was in the yard, but Kate’s rental car was not. Whither Kate? I wondered.

  I knocked on the door. No one opened it. I knocked louder, and allowed myself the beginning of a worry.

  “Don’t beat the door down,” said Joe’s voice from behind me. “It’s not locked.”

  I turned and saw him coming out of the woods from the direction of his own house, which was about a half mile away at the northern edge of the clay cliffs that had given Gay Head its name. He was wearing camouflage hunting clothes and carrying a shotgun. The best possible cover during hunting season.

  He poked a thumb over his shoulder. “I got your call while I was in the woods. Come on inside.” He glanced at the two vehicles in the yard, frowned briefly, and led me into the house. “You see Kate?” he asked.

  “No. Not since this morning, here with you.”

  “She said she was going to stay here.”

  “Women don’t always do what they say.”

  “Neither do men.” He put his shotgun in a closet. “You cut off your call pretty fast.”

  “I didn’t want to spend much time on the line.”

  He arched a brow. “You think somebody’s tapping your phone?”

  “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody was trying to trace you through yours. I don’t know how they do it, but I know it can be done.”

  He nodded. “It can be done, but nobody has bugged this room yet, so tell me about this something that brings you up here into Indian country.”

  I told him about Samuel Arbuckle’s demise in my driveway and my conversations with Dom Agganis. “I didn’t mention you or Kate,” I said, “because I wanted you to know about what happened first.”

  He looked thoughtful. “Dom is going to be pretty pissed off when he finds out.”

  “Maybe he won’t find out.”

  “Oh, he’ll find out, all right. He’s bound to have called Washington about Arbuckle, and DIA agents are probably already on their way. One of their own is dead and they’ll want to talk with you about it and with Dom, too. There’ll be a lot of narrow eyes and sniffing noses, and it’ll be hard to keep anything from them.”

  “I’ll tell them what I told Dom. No more, no less. The only other people who know about Arbuckle following Kate are you and her. If either of you decides to talk about that, I’ll suddenly remember it, too. What are they going to do? Throw me in jail?”

  “That’s exactly what they’ll try to do. Obstruction of justice, lying to the police, Homeland Security, and all like that.”

  It wasn’t a pleasant prospect. “Did you know Samuel Arbuckle?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know the name. You sure of those last words of his?”

  “I’m sure. Did you ever hear Kate mention Arbuckle?”

  “No, but it’s no secret that she has an active social life with a lot of men in it.”

  “Bu
t she said she didn’t recognize him when she was in Vineyard Haven.”

  “She also said she really didn’t get a good look at him.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t imagine her not recognizing him if he was a boyfriend. Do you suppose she might have been lying?”

  “It’s possible. What do you think?”

  “I thought she was being straight, but I’m not hard to fool.”

  Begay went to the stove and tapped a finger on the coffeemaker. “Still warm. She hasn’t been gone long. Kate is a beautiful woman and she lives in a town where a lot of people know each other.”

  There was something elusive about him. “Arbuckle was married,” I said. “I saw a photo in his wallet. He had a pretty wife and two kids.”

  “A lot of married guys chase the girls, so that means nothing.” Joe got two cups from a cabinet. “What means something is what he said to you: ‘Not the Bunny. Tailgate.’ He had to be talking about the Easter Bunny. Anything else would be too coincidental. What was he trying to tell you? That it wasn’t the Bunny who shot him? And what’s that got to do with a tailgate?”

  “That it wasn’t the Bunny, whatever that means. Is Tailgate a code name or the name of a place? A bar, maybe? He thought the name was important because he used his last breath to say so.”

  Joe poured coffee and handed me a cup. “I never heard of Tailgate. Why did he come to your house to die? Why you?”

  It was a popular question and I gave him the answer I’d given Dom Agganis: that it was either coincidental or because he knew who I was and decided to trust me.

  “Why would he trust you, of all people?”

  “I told Dom I didn’t know, and I don’t. But if I was to guess, I’d say that Arbuckle probably checked me out after he got my license plate. If he did, he knew where I lived and he knew I wasn’t in the spook business and that I was basically pretty uninteresting except for the fact that I seemed to know Kate. If he was watching when I checked for a tail on her car as she drove out of town, he might have decided that I was a friend of hers and maybe even knew something about her work. Maybe that made me trustworthy in his mind. When he got shot, he didn’t have much time to decide what to do, so he may have just taken the best chance he had.”

  “Any idea why he was following Kate?”

  “You tell me. You’re in the spook business.”

  He let that go by without comment, and again I sensed elusiveness in him. He sipped his coffee and looked out the window.

  “If Kate was here, maybe she could tell us,” he said at last. Then he allowed himself a quick bit of temper. “Where the hell is she?” As quickly as it had come, the anger was gone. “If it isn’t the Bunny, who is it?”

  I had been thinking about that, but not too clearly. “Did the three other people on the trade mission, the three dead ones, have enemies other than the Easter Bunny?”

  Joe’s expression didn’t change. “Everybody has enemies.”

  “I mean enemies mad enough to kill them.”

  “There are probably people abroad who didn’t shed any tears when they learned they were dead.”

  “Who knew about the membership of the trade mission?”

  Joe shook his head. “You won’t get any names from me, but you can guess that a lot of thought and planning went into the job and that a good many people were involved. All of them knew something about it. The Boss and his top people knew everything.”

  “How about his secretary?”

  “He’d know. And so would a few other people with top clearance. Not too many, though, because they’d want to maintain plausible deniability in case something went wrong.”

  “You mean that if things got screwed up, you five mission people were on your own?”

  “That’s how it works. State would try to help us out because we’re American citizens, but they wouldn’t necessarily know why we were over there.”

  “None of you had official government jobs that could be traced?”

  He stared at me, then shrugged. “I’m in the private sector. I haven’t worked for the government since I retired from the army twenty years ago.”

  “But the trade mission, at least the part having to do with the Easter Bunny and his friends, had to be a government job. You worked for a guy you call the Boss. You did contract work for Washington.”

  “I don’t remember ever saying that, and I don’t think anyone will find any paperwork that says it. You’ll be better off leaving this alone.”

  “So I’ll have deniability, too?”

  “Something like that. The less you know about this sort of thing the less dangerous you are to certain people. It’s not a good thing to have those people thinking about you.”

  I felt my hands forming fists. “You must mean some people here in America. No foreign terrorist would mind if I spilled the beans about any of this business. Are you telling me that there are American agents willing to assassinate other Americans who might know things they shouldn’t know?”

  His wide face revealed no emotion. “If there are such people, I don’t know of them, and I think I’d have heard. I know there are conspiracy buffs who believe there are secret government assassination groups working out of Washington, but I’ve never heard of any policy authorizing such activities. It’s possible that some rogue agent might do something like that on his own, but if he did he’d be treated like any other murderer. Still, it’s better if you’re not inside the circle of people who interests the authorities.”

  That was probably true. Even in small towns it’s better not to be “known to the police,” as most local perps are. Once you’re known, you get watched. I willed my fists back into hands.

  “What I’m wondering,” I said, “is whether somebody besides the Bunny may be in action here, and what that person or those people are up to.”

  Joe’s stony lips flickered through a brief smile. “I’ve wondered about that myself, and so have some other people, in Washington. You don’t look surprised.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I haven’t had very many original ideas during my life. Most of my best ones turn out to have been written down by some Greek or Roman several thousand years ago. What does Kate think?”

  His smile was gone. “We could ask her if she was here.”

  But Kate wasn’t there, and we didn’t know where she was or why.

  13

  “I don’t know much about Kate,” I said. “What do you know?”

  I thought his stony face became even stonier, but all he said was “Enough to trust her on jobs. She did good work during the trade mission.”

  “Had you worked with her before?”

  “Once. On an earlier job. She was good that time, too. Very professional.”

  “You say she has an active social life. What do you know about that?”

  He eyed me carefully over his coffee cup. “I’ve heard the scuttlebutt about her being a popular girl at home, and I believe it, but she never let her private life interfere when she was working with me. I don’t investigate people’s personal lives unless it’s part of an assignment.”

  That last sentence interested me. “One of the jobs you do is checking out people’s private lives? I thought the FBI usually did that.”

  “Other outfits do it, too.” His lips formed a cold smile. “There are a lot of rivalries among agencies. They don’t always trust one another to give them the true scoop on something.”

  “Would the DIA be interested in checking out Kate?” He glanced out the window. “Maybe.”

  Why the glance? “Why would they be interested?”

  His eyes came back and his smile faded. “I’ll ask them when they come to see me. It shouldn’t be too long before they’re here.”

  “Does Kate have a shotgun to go along with that pistol of hers?”

  He studied me. “You think she may have blasted Arbuckle?”

  “It’s a thought.”

  He shook his head. “In the first place, I don’t think she has a shotgun. In th
e second, if she and Arbuckle were enemies he wouldn’t have let her get close to him with a shotgun. And if they were friends she wouldn’t have any reason to shoot him.”

  “Unless he thought they were friends and she thought otherwise.”

  “You’re getting cynical in your old age, J.W. Where would she have gotten the gun?”

  “Maybe she stole it. Half the houses on Martha’s Vineyard have shotguns in them. With her training I imagine she could have gotten into some place without any trouble at all.”

  “She could manage that, but I still don’t make her for the shooter. She’d have had to steal the gun, then arrange to meet Arbuckle someplace private, then show up with the gun, and shoot him before he knew what was happening. And she’d have had to do all that very quickly. What time did Arbuckle come down your road?”

  I told him. “It wasn’t long after I got home from seeing you and Kate earlier today. I see what you mean about quickly. She was here with you when I left.”

  He nodded. “And she was still here when I left about fifteen minutes later to scout my house. Doesn’t leave her much time to kill Arbuckle.”

  “Unless she already had the gun and a date to meet him.”

  “It would still be tight.”

  “Maybe too tight. But she went somewhere.”

  His mouth suggested annoyance. “Yeah, she went somewhere. I’ll be glad when this is over and she’s back home in Bethesda.”

  I thought of Joe and Kate together here in this old house. He was an attractive man and she was an attractive woman. Five days was a long time, and Toni Begay was far away.

  “Has she mentioned knowing any other men here?” I asked. “Say, a Washington suit with a house on the Vineyard? There are a lot of D.C. people with places here.”