In the summer, Skyline Drive was a virtual parking lot. But this early in the season, he had the road to himself even on a Sunday. Driving helped him think, and as he zipped through the park Sam wrestled with the unanswerable questions that had kept him up at night since seeing Vanalika’s name in the NSA intercept. His thoughts kept drifting back to Andy. There was no getting around the fact that the young analyst would still be alive if Sam hadn’t asked him to start turning over rocks. It was his fault that Andy was dead. That would be with him forever. Overlaying this sense of responsibility was a burning shame at the relief he had felt when Quick had told him that Spears did not know he and Andy had been working together. It was instinctual, something at the animal level. Self-preservation.
He stopped at the Ivy Creek overlook to stretch his legs and clear his head. The trees were just coming into bloom at the higher elevations, and Sam had an unobstructed view down the length of the Blue Ridge to Stony Man Mountain. To the west, he could see the Alleghenies outlined against a sky that was a perfect cerulean blue. Off to the east, however, Sam could see a dark band of clouds on the horizon like a portent of a gathering storm.
It seemed appropriate. Powerful pieces were being moved around the global chessboard, but Sam could not see whose hands were moving which pieces. Not from the perspective of a pawn.
He had an idea, however, about someone who might, an interesting friend who himself had interesting friends.
Skyline Drive fed into I-64 not too far from the mountain cabin where Sam and Vanalika had so recently spent an idyllic weekend. I-64 took him to I-81 and for some two hundred miles it was all straight and flat.
At Glade Spring, Virginia, he got off the interstate onto a rural highway that took him into North Carolina. The single-lane road crossed in and out of a national forest before reaching Linville. From there, he followed the GPS program in his phone to an unmarked dirt track that Google assured him was called Dry Gulch Road.
Sam pulled into a dirt-and-gravel driveway and parked next to a black mailbox that had a number 9 on it hand-lettered in white paint. The farmhouse at number 9 was ramshackle, with a swayback roofline and peeling red paint. Sam got out and walked up to the front porch. At one end of the porch, two telescopes were propped up on tripods. One was fat and stubby, and the other long and graceful. They were not toys, and they did not look cheap.
At the other end, a heavyset man in jeans and a blue work shirt was dozing in an overstuffed chair with his head tipped back and his mouth open. He snored softly. There was a half-full bottle of bourbon on the coffee table in front of him and a glass tumbler in which melting ice cubes had lightened the liquor by several shades. Sam sat down on one of the other chairs arranged loosely around the table. He took off his sunglasses and set them next to the bottle.
“Why don’t you go into the kitchen and get yourself a glass. Bring some more ice while you’re at it.” The man’s eyes did not open and the snoring only scaled back a decibel or two rather than stopping, but he was clearly awake.
“Afternoon, Earl.”
“Afternoon, Sam.”
Sam went to the kitchen, which looked like it could have been a model from the Sears catalog of 1935. He found glasses in one of the cabinets and a bowl that he filled with ice from a Frigidaire that was old enough to have rust spots.
On the porch, he poured two healthy slugs of bourbon over ice. It was good stuff, a small-batch Kentucky bourbon called Knob Creek.
Sam placed one of the glasses in front of his host, who was now wide-awake and attentive. He looked largely as Sam had remembered him, with a head of thick white hair that was all but untamable and icy blue eyes that sparkled with a kind of fierce intelligence. There was an ugly scar under his right eye, white and purple and about two inches long. Sam had heard half a dozen different stories about that scar. All of them, he suspected, were wrong.
“Thank you kindly,” his host said, raising his glass briefly before taking a sip.
“You’re more than welcome. It’s your whiskey.”
“That it is. How long has it been, Sam?”
“Almost five years.”
Sam had known Earl Holly since his first post in the Foreign Service. In Islamabad almost twenty-five years ago, Sam had been the junior guy in the political section and Earl had been the CIA station chief. Holly had taken a shine to Sam and he had brought him in on meetings that had given Sam a new and richer understanding of how things in Pakistan actually worked. Through Holly’s patronage, Sam had developed a network of contacts and connections well beyond what a junior officer could ordinarily expect to achieve. As a result, Sam had started to build a reputation as an up-and-comer, a potential that he had manifestly failed to fulfill.
The Islamabad assignment had led to stints in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Karachi. Often, his career path had intercepted with Holly’s. Earl had bounced back and forth between South Asia and Washington. But while Sam’s responsibilities were open and straightforward, Earl had been part of the secretive puzzle palace of Cold War espionage. He had cut his teeth on the 1965 war between India and Pakistan that had threatened to embroil the United States and the Soviet Union in a potentially catastrophic proxy conflict. Later, he had played a key role in arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan, precipitating a humiliating Soviet withdrawal from South Asia and contributing to the eventual collapse of the USSR. In D.C., Earl had occupied a succession of senior intelligence positions, eventually rising to deputy director of the clandestine service before age and a power play on the part of a rival in the DNI’s office had forced him into retirement.
“The fish will never see me coming,” he had promised at his retirement party.
Sam had lost touch with Earl when he left D.C. and the South Asia policy universe. A North Carolina native and a proud Tarheel, Earl had once told him that he did not want to be one of those D.C. lifers who never realize when it’s time to move on.
“When I’m gone, I’m gone,” he had explained.
Sam had had to call in a few favors to get Earl’s current contact information. Earl liked his privacy. Even so, the word was that he had not broken completely with his former life. A CIA contact told Sam that Earl had kept his own private network active. The same contact had warned him that Earl was more interested in the bourbon bottle than the dusty fishing rod Sam had spotted propped up against the wall in the kitchen.
Half-soused and living like a mad hermit in the woods, Earl Holly still knew more about South Asia and, more important, about South Asia specialists in the intelligence community in Washington than any man alive. He knew where most of the bodies were buried, if only because he had interred so many of them himself. If anyone could help Sam tease apart the mystery of Panoptes, it was Earl.
“So what motivated you to make the long drive down here? To say nothing of finding me in the first place. You in trouble? I’ll bet it’s about a girl. It’s always a girl.”
“It’s partly about a girl,” Sam agreed with a grin.
“You need romantic advice? Well, you’ve come to the right place.” Earl took another snort of bourbon and set the glass to rest at the apex of his substantial belly.
Yeah, what woman could resist?
“I need your help with a puzzle,” Sam said instead.
“I’m good at puzzles.”
“You’re the best.”
Sam laid out for Earl everything that he knew, from his discovery of the suspect NSA intercept to his conversation with Quick Sands at Krittenbrink’s funeral.
“I’m sorry about Andy,” Earl said, when Sam had finished. “I didn’t know him. He came in after I was already out. But I heard good things from some of my old friends, and I know that you and he were close.”
“Thanks. We were. And what happened to him was my fault. I never should have gotten him involved in this. Andy’s death was a tragedy. But if Quick was right, it was more than that. It wa
s premeditated murder.”
Earl closed his eyes for a moment as though deep in thought. Without opening his eyes, he reached sure-handed for the tumbler he had set back on the coffee table and took another generous sip of the Knob Creek.
“Tell me more about Argus Systems.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Who owns it. Who runs it. How profitable is it. What kind of ties does the management have to the government. And whatever else you think might be of value.”
“Argus is privately held and the owner of record is a shell company in Bermuda. I did a little digging around before I took the job, and word was that the initial financing for Argus came from a VC firm called Perseus Capital.”
“Argus. Perseus. Panoptes. Someone really likes their Greeks.”
“That’s modern Washington. Romans who think they’re Greeks.”
Earl chuckled and poured himself another two fingers of bourbon.
“What about management?”
“The CEO is a guy named Garret Spears. Ex-military. Former Special Forces. Spent some time in North Africa but more time in South Arlington. He’s been with Argus from the beginning. Very smooth and very, very well connected.”
“To whom?”
“I’m not sure,” Sam admitted. “At least I don’t know who his primary patron is inside the Lord administration. He had the connections to get a very lucrative contract to provide intel and analysis on South Asia. That’s why they brought me on.”
“The contract is for both collection and analysis?”
“That’s right.”
“So who’s doing the collection part?”
“There’s a group within Argus that operates in their own private universe. They sure don’t look like analysts. Or talk like analysts, for that matter.”
“Former Agency?”
“Military, I think. Maybe some PSYOPs types and certainly some guys who were former Special Forces. The head of the unit is a guy named Weeder.”
“John Weeder?”
“Yeah.”
“Ex-navy?”
“Former SEAL, I believe. Same as Spears.”
“Maybe at one point. After that, he worked for a . . . darker . . . part of the SpecOps world.”
“Do you know him?”
“I met him once. It was like being introduced to Death at a cocktail party. He has a reputation, and I’m familiar with at least some of the accomplishments on his résumé. He is not a nice man.”
“No,” Sam agreed. “He is not.”
Earl sat silently for a minute, and Sam could almost see the gears turning in his head. Earl Holly had a class-A brain. Alcohol may have dulled the edge a bit, but he was still plenty sharp.
“Let’s look at Panoptes for a moment,” Earl said, when the critical components seemed finally to have meshed. “The program seems aimed at driving India and Pakistan closer to war, maybe even right over the edge into nuclear Armageddon. Who in their right mind would want to do such a thing?”
It seemed to be a rhetorical question, as though he already knew the answer and he was just walking Sam forward to the same conclusion.
“In their right mind? No one I can think of.”
“Commander Weeder’s involvement leads me to a conclusion that I don’t especially like.”
“Which is?”
“Tell me. Have you ever heard of a group called the Stoics?”
“More Greeks? It was a school of philosophy in Athens. Wasn’t it Zeno who founded it?”
“Ah, the value of a liberal arts education. Yes, it was Zeno. But those aren’t the Stoics I mean. There’s an American group of the same name that has been on the fringes of policy making in Washington since long before you and I were around.”
“Like a club?”
“Of sorts. The membership is limited. They are people of influence who believe they have a special duty to lead the Republic through hard times, to make difficult choices on the basis of rational calculus and then take action.”
“How come I’ve never heard of them?”
“They prefer it that way. They do most of their work through cutouts and front companies. They do as little as possible directly.”
“And how come you have heard of them?”
“I have run into this group a number of times over the years. They had certain interests in Afghanistan, for example, that were not aligned with mine. They wanted to include the hardline Wahhabi elements in our train-and-equip program. I thought we could do the job without them and warned my superiors that we needed to look ten or twenty years down the road before bringing the crazies in on what we were doing. It wasn’t even close. I lost. There’s three thousand American dead from 9/11 who can attest to that.”
“So you know who the Stoics are?”
“No.”
Sam looked quizzical.
“Do you know why I moved out here to the middle of nowhere?”
“Fishing?” Sam offered, on the theory that this answer was more polite than “bourbon.”
“Nah. I don’t really like fishing. That’s just what you’re supposed to say at your retirement party. No, I moved out here for the skies.” Earl nodded toward the twin telescopes at the far end of the porch. “I didn’t like to talk about this back in the world. It’s a little too sissy for someone who was in my line of work. But I’ve been a sky watcher since I was a kid. The night skies out here are fantastic. There’s no light pollution and we’re up pretty high so you get a clear view of the stars. I’m hoping maybe someday to get my name on a comet, even if ‘Holly’s Comet’ comes dangerously close to copyright infringement.”
Sam nodded encouragingly, confident that Earl would eventually get around to the point.
“Do you know how astronomers—real astronomers, I mean—not us amateurs. Do you know how they find black holes?”
“With a very big telescope?”
“Well, yes. But not really. At least not directly. You can’t see a black hole. The gravity is so strong it sucks in everything around it, including light. But massive gravity like that affects other things that are nearby, things like stars and planets. The black hole affects their movements ever so slightly. But with the right instruments, you can capture the change. Measure it. And from those measurements, you can tell that there’s a black hole in a particular part of space.”
“So you don’t have to see it to know it’s there,” Sam suggested.
“That’s right. Did you know that there’s a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy that just sits there eating solar systems like popcorn?”
“I’ll confess that I did not.”
“Well, no one’s seen it, but the astronomers are pretty sure it’s there. You can see how it influences the stars around it, and it’s the only explanation that fits the data. Now here’s the thing. As important as that black hole is, you wouldn’t want to get too close to it. It’d suck you in and scatter your particles across the eighth dimension or whatever. It would be decidedly unhealthy.”
The corner of Sam’s mouth turned up just slightly at the Buckaroo Banzai reference. Earl Holly, legendary CIA case officer, was a closet science-fiction geek. Who knew?
“And the Stoics are like that?” he asked. “You can’t see them, but you can see what they do?”
“Pretty much. You can see its outlines because it’s the part of what you’re looking at that you can’t see. You can see its shadow and you can see its effects. But don’t get too close.”
“Weeder is a part of this?”
“I don’t think he’s a member. At least not a member of the senior leadership. He’s a killer. An assassin. I think he does the wet work for the Stoics, or at least he used to. If he’s with Argus Systems now, there’s a good chance that the company is somehow linked to the Stoics. It’d be consistent with past practice.�
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“So why would a group like that want a war on the subcontinent? Arms sales?”
“I don’t think so. That would be a little too venal for the Stoics. They aren’t salesmen and they aren’t interested in money.”
“What does interest them?”
“Cassandra.”
“Another Greek?”
“The last one for now . . . I hope. Cassandra is a computer, an extremely powerful computer that some very smart people were using to model nuclear terrorism. Where a weapon might come from. Who would use it. How they would get it into the United States. Whether they might simply explode it or try to blackmail the government into pulling out of the Middle East, for example.”
“Let me guess. Cassandra decided that Pakistan was the most likely source of the bomb.”
“That’s what my . . . friends . . . tell me.”
“I wonder how many millions of dollars the government spent to reach that blindingly obvious conclusion.”
“Not ‘M,’ my boy, ‘B.’ Billions.”
“And your friends the Stoics decided that a nuclear war was the way to solve the problem? Have India turn the country into a smoking pile of glass?”
“I don’t think that’s it.”
“Then what?”
Earl hesitated. For just a moment, Sam had the impression that he was about to say something important, to fill in a piece of the puzzle. But the moment passed quickly, and it was possible that Sam had simply imagined it. Hope, he knew, could do that.
“I’m not sure,” Earl said finally, although his answer was not quite—for Sam at least—believable.
They sat there in silence, listening to the sounds of the insects and birds from the woods.
“What are you going to do?” Earl asked after a while.
“I need answers.”
“Do you even know the questions?”
Secrets of State Page 15