Sam wanted desperately to close his eyes, put his head on the desk, give himself over to the crushing sadness that came with the knowledge of his friend’s death.
“What can I do?” he asked instead.
“You can’t do a damn thing, Sam. Andy’s dead.”
“I meant for you, Sara.”
Sam was glad to see Sara demonstrating the kind of combative moxie she was famous for. It would help her through this. Sara and Andy had been friends for years. It was going to be hard for all of them. She shook her head.
“Not now.”
“Do you know anything more about what happened?” Sam asked.
“Just that he was found early this morning on Ridge Street, about three blocks from the metro station. He’d been shot. His wallet and watch were gone, and the police think it was an addict looking for a quick score. The neighborhood fits the profile. There are no suspects.”
Even under emotional duress, Sara Zehri could give a briefing.
“His watch was gone?” Sam asked.
“Yes. Why?”
“Andy wore one of the cheapest digital watches I have ever seen. It looked like something you would find in a box of cereal. It couldn’t have cost him more than a couple of bucks. Who’d want to steal it?”
“I doubt the guy thought it through. He’s probably got a mental checklist: wallet, rings, watch. That kind of thing. Addicts aren’t the most logical sort.”
If it was an addict, Sam thought to himself. As an analyst, he did not believe in coincidences. On Tuesday, Andy Krittenbrink identified a data set that linked a secretive government contractor to what was potentially a massive intelligence fraud. On Thursday, he was dead. Correlation is not causality. But it was still suspicious as hell. The first creeping tendrils of guilt began to claw at Sam’s conscience.
Sam did not want to jump to conclusions without evidence. It was most likely that Andy’s death was just what it was purported to be, tragic and utterly explicable. A bad neighborhood. Bad luck. And a bad day. Unless Andy had done the one thing Sam had asked him not to do and had talked to someone about the Panoptes messages. They had not spoken about it on the phone, at least not in a specific way. But Sam was not willing to write Andy’s death off as a random act of violence. Not yet. Could he have inadvertently put Andy in danger by asking him to dig into the intel records? It was possible. Maybe the search that Andy had performed in the database had triggered a warning. Sophisticated algorithms stood guard over the nation’s secrets, looking for the kind of search queries that were hallmarks of espionage. Edward Snowden’s exposure of the full range of NSA activities had prodded the intelligence community into reinforcing that kind of passive surveillance. Andy’s search terms may have tripped an alarm of some sort. If so, was Sam ultimately accountable for his death? It was painful to even consider the question.
“What about the funeral arrangements?” he asked.
“The Parklawn cemetery in Rockville on Saturday morning. Andy’s parents have suggested a donation to the Red Cross instead of flowers. Andy was never a big flowers guy.”
She started to cry again, softly this time.
Sam closed his eyes. There would be time later for questions and recriminations. For now, he had a friend to mourn.
• • •
Mother Nature offered up a suitably gloomy backdrop to the funeral. It wasn’t raining, but it wasn’t not raining either. The sky was an iron gray, and the mist that clung to the ground ensured that the mourners were damp and miserable despite the black umbrellas that many of them carried.
There was a good turnout, somewhere around fifty or sixty people. Sam hoped that he did as well when his time came. He knew some of them, mostly South Asia policy people and a few other State Department types. Most of the mourners, however, were strangers, family and friends from other parts of Andy’s life.
An attractive blond woman in a tailored black suit had been introduced to him as Andy’s fiancée. She looked to be totally out of Krittenbrink’s league. Well done, young grasshopper, Sam thought. I’m so terribly sorry about the life you’re going to miss out on: love, family, a house in one of the D.C. suburbs with good schools for the kids. It’s not fair.
Andy’s parents were stolid Midwesterners who were staggering under the weight of a burden that no parent should have to bear. To Sam’s surprise, Andy’s mother had asked him to be a pallbearer.
“He looked up to you,” she had explained. “He talked about you all the time and said that he admired your integrity. I would like it if you would help carry him to his final rest and maybe say a few words.”
Sam had been struck by her composure, and now he stood waiting for the hearse to arrive alongside the eclectic group that would carry Andy’s body the short distance to the gravesite: a brother, a cousin, a friend from Andy’s hometown in Minnesota, a college roommate, and a Sri Lanka specialist from Brookings with whom Andy had been working on a book.
The hearse pulled up as close to the grave as possible, and Sam helped pull the heavy maple coffin out of the back. It felt like an out-of-body experience. When he closed his eyes, he was looking down on the scene, hovering some twenty feet overhead like the figure in Janani’s final painting. His feet moved over the slippery grass, and he carried his share of the weight, but it was all autopilot. Muscle memory.
The funeral home had laid a green carpet around the grave as a kind of border lined with flowers in white and yellow. It was a poor disguise. Like garish makeup on a corpse. Gussied up, it was still a naked gash in the earth in which Sam would have to place the body of a friend. The pallbearers laid the coffin on the thick nylon webbing that stretched over the grave itself. The coffin was suspended in space, lying on the cusp of the underworld.
• • •
Folding chairs stood in ragged rows under a broad white awning. Sam sat between Sara and Shoe. It was raining for real now and the light staccato of the rain beating against the canvas was oddly soothing.
Andy hadn’t exactly been the churchgoing type. The Unitarian minister who had agreed to lead the services had never actually met Andy. He had met with the family and a number of friends so that he would have some material to work with, but it was still pretty threadbare. Sam paid minimal attention to the minister’s words. Inevitably, the man quoted Ben Jonson’s line—“in short measures, life may perfect be”—which was actually about fleeting moments of happiness rather than death and certainly not about dying too damn young. Andy would have known that, and it would have rankled just a little. As an analyst, he had been nothing if not precise.
But what did it matter? What did it matter to Andy?
While the minister spoke, Sam’s mind wandered back and forth across the problem set. Was Andy’s death a tragic accident, to the extent that murder can ever be an accident? Or was it somehow connected to the mysterious Panoptes program. How was Panoptes tied to Argus Systems? And—he approached this one tentatively, ashamed of its inherent selfishness—if whoever was behind Panoptes knew about Andy, did they know about Sam too? Underlying all of this was the $64,000 question: What the hell was Panoptes?
He felt a sudden sharp pain on his right instep. Sara had driven one six-inch heel down hard on his foot. He realized that the minister had stopped speaking. People were looking at him. It was his turn to speak.
Sam stood and made his way to the front. There was a lectern decorated with the outlines of doves. Sam stood beside the lectern rather than behind it, leaning one hand on the top for support.
“Hello,” he began. “My name is Sam Trainor and Andy Krittenbrink was both my colleague and my friend. We worked together in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. INR they call it. I was just passing through, but it was Andy’s professional home for most of his adult life. We shared a passion for South Asia: the people, the cultures, the history, and the complex politics of the place. Nothing mad
e Andy happier than solving a puzzle.
“Not long after I joined INR, one of the youngest analysts we had, heck one of the youngest analysts I’d ever seen . . . he looked to me to be all of sixteen or seventeen . . . gave me a report to review. It was a piece of leadership analysis, essentially a bio of the new chief of the Bangladeshi military who was coming to Washington for a round of introductory calls. We were under pressure to keep everything we wrote short and tight, and there was a paragraph in the report about the general’s lepidopterist leanings. He was evidently an avid butterfly collector, a point that this young analyst had expanded into some four sentences of our one-page report. When I told him to cut the butterflies and replace them with something more military-sounding, Andy pushed back. Firmly and persuasively. The butterflies were what he called the telling detail, the small point that illuminated the larger whole. The general, he explained, was acquisitive and almost pathological in his need for order and structure. He liked small things. He was more a tactician than a strategist. That was the point. It wasn’t about the butterflies.
“In the end, the butterflies survived and we got the report back from the secretary of state with a hand-scribbled note about how much she had enjoyed reading the bio and how helpful it had been. I learned something pretty important that day.
“With that in mind, I would offer you a brief story about Andy that I consider a telling detail.
“Two years ago, Andy and I were part of a fact-finding team traveling through India and Sri Lanka assessing the progress in the fight against human trafficking. Slavery is not a thing of the past. Tens of thousands of people still live in bondage in South Asia.
“As part of our research, we met with the director of a shelter and halfway house in Lucknow who was working with victims of trafficking to help them start new lives. It was a noble mission, but an expensive one, and the director told us that the center would likely have to close its doors sometime in the next couple of months unless he could find a consistent source of funding. The twenty-odd families living there would be out on the streets.
“This was not an uncommon tale of woe in what we jaded diplomats often dismissively refer to as the do-gooder sector. Listening with empathy, or at least apparent empathy, is part of the job. We had all heard stories like this many times before, however, and five minutes after leaving the meeting it was gone, like water off a duck’s back. For me that is. Not for Andy.
“Andy showed up for breakfast in the hotel the next morning looking like he’d slept in his clothes—like he hadn’t slept at all, in fact. The rest of us teased him mercilessly, I’m embarrassed to admit, about a young man’s night on the town in Lucknow.
“On our way to the first meeting of the morning, Andy asked to stop by the shelter we had visited the day before. There, he handed the director a memory stick with a well-researched and carefully constructed grant application along with the names and e-mail addresses of a dozen relevant foundations. Andy had stayed up all night to write it.
“The shelter got the grant and it is still in operation today, helping some of humanity’s least fortunate to build new and better lives.
“Andy was a superb analyst, but he was an even better human being. He was not content simply to observe the world. He wanted to change it. And he did.”
And it may have killed him, Sam added silently.
“The world is a poorer place without Andy Krittenbrink in it,” he concluded, looking at Andy’s mother as he said the final words. From the brightness in her tearstained eyes, Sam could tell that he had hit the right note. He hoped that he had brought her some small measure of comfort in her hour of grief.
At the end of the ceremony, cemetery workers lowered the casket into the grave. Sam joined a line of mourners who waited to throw a shovel full of dirt on top of the casket. Afterward, he stood alone under the shelter of a beech tree as Andy’s family gathered by the gravesite for a private moment.
Someone touched his arm from behind. He turned to see a familiar face. “That was a nice speech.”
“Thanks, Quick. I can barely remember what I said.”
“You diplomats are all so damn glib.”
Edward “Quick” Sands was the head of the CIA’s South Asia analysis unit. Sam had not noticed Quick among the mourners. That was one of his talents. Blending in. No one ever seemed to notice Quick. With his long face, gray hair and dark suit, he looked like an undertaker, just part of the backdrop at the Parklawn cemetery.
“Can we talk?” Quick asked.
“Sure.”
Quick led Sam away from the gravesite to a relatively dry spot under the eaves of a massive marble mausoleum.
“How have you been?” Sam asked. “I haven’t seen you since I moved over to Argus.”
“I know. The siren song of the private sector. I’ve heard it too. The Beltway Bandits have been gobbling up so many of my best people that I decided it was time to make the move myself. I’ve been in talks with Xenos about taking a job with them and being seconded back to the Agency. It’d be a 50 percent bump in salary and I’d be drawing my pension on top.” Quick looked almost apologetic.
“Xenos is an Argus subsidiary.”
“It is. Which explains what I did . . . maybe a little bit. Even if it can’t justify it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Andy came to Langley three days ago to see me,” Quick said carefully.
“Oh, shit.”
Quick looked at him appraisingly.
“You know about this?” he asked.
“Panoptes?”
“Yes.”
“I told him not to talk to anyone.”
“I can understand why.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He showed me a copy of the analysis he’d done. It was good work, remarkably good work. I think that was one of the reasons he came to me. Andy knew it was good and it killed him to sit on it.” Quick winced at his own poor choice of words. “Stupid pride.”
“I told him I needed some time,” Sam said miserably.
“Maybe he had doubts. You being with Argus and all.”
“Wait. Did Andy tell you that Argus was the source of the Panoptes material?”
“He did. He told me it wasn’t clear to him at first, but he’d figured it out.”
Sam should have thought of that. Krittenbrink was smart as hell and a trained analyst. The connection between Panoptes and Argus was not especially hard to draw once you knew to look for it.
“Andy didn’t mention to you that we’d worked on this together?”
“No.”
Sam’s stomach turned over, and for a moment, he thought he was going to be sick. Maybe Andy had gone around him to the CIA because he was trying to protect Sam from any possible retribution from his employer. Or maybe he was uncertain about Sam’s ultimate loyalties. Whatever his reason, the results were the same. His friend was dead. And he was dead at least in part because Sam had not trusted him with the full truth. It had been a stupid decision on Sam’s part, and another data point to add to the guilt set. He swallowed hard and tasted bile in the back of his throat.
“Now, here’s the thing.” Quick paused as though searching for the right words.
“Yes?”
“Andy clearly wanted me to do something with the report. Push a button under my desk and summon some secret CIA SWAT team to assault Argus headquarters in Arlington. I’m not sure what he wanted. Probably he wasn’t either.”
“So what’d you do?”
“I called Garret Spears and I asked him what was going on. Spears was absolutely accommodating. He denied any knowledge of Panoptes but said he’d look into it. If it was an act, it was one hell of a convincing one.”
“You called Spears?”
Quick looked at the ground between them.
“Yeah. I did. And I wish
like hell that I could take that back. So, maybe twenty-four hours after my conversation with Spears, Andy is shot in a crime that is never going to be solved. Doesn’t that set off your coincidence alarms?”
“Mine were ringing even before you told me that Andy had talked to you,” Sam admitted.
“I called a friend on the D.C. police force to get some background on the case. Andy was shot twice in the head with a 9mm. What kind of addict does a double-tap to the head? That’s more like a professional hit than a fucked-up drug deal. Believe me, Spears knows people who do that kind of thing for a living.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Sam said, thinking of John Weeder’s cold, dead eyes. “I think he may even employ some of them.”
“I have thirty years in the intel community,” Quick said. “And this is the first time I’ve ever been afraid, the first time I’ve known something I wish I didn’t know. If Argus is really behind what happened to Andy, what’s to stop them from coming after me? Spears seems to trust me for now. But how long will it last?”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I have four months of leave saved up. I’m using a chunk of it starting tomorrow. At this point, my primary career objective is not to die. I’m going somewhere I can lie low for a while and see if I can escape notice.”
“I’m confident you’ll succeed in that,” Sam said, without a hint of irony in his voice. “Let me ask you, Quick. What the hell is Panoptes?”
“I have no idea.”
“Who would?”
Quick shrugged.
“Watch yourself, Sam. I think Spears may be a little unbalanced.”
“What makes you say so?”
“After I told him about Andy’s report, all he wanted to do was ask me a bunch of questions about fucking trolley cars.”
SKYLINE DRIVE, VIRGINIA
APRIL 11
It should have been a seven-hour drive from D.C. to Linville, North Carolina. When Sam reached Front Royal, however, he made a spur-of-the-moment decision to take Skyline Drive rather than follow I-81 South, which was put-a-brick-on-the-accelerator flat and straight. Skyline was a beautiful meandering route along the ridge of the Shenandoahs.
Secrets of State Page 14