Sam logged on to Gmail, hoping that there was something from Lena.
A part of him expected to find access to his account blocked, but it opened normally and he skimmed briefly through the twenty or so unread messages in his in-box. Most were trash, “special offers” from various businesses and putative Nigerian princes that had managed to get ahold of his e-mail address. As much as possible, Sam used a separate account, biteme99@hotmail, that he had set up for when websites demanded his e-mail address. Over the years, however, his real account had bled over enough that his box was starting to get clogged with junk. There were also a few notes from friends and one from an address that Sam did not know but immediately recognized: Zeno of Citium.
That was the only identifying information. There was no ISP provider and no generic or country-specific top-level domain. Just the name and birthplace of the Greek philosopher from the third century BC, the father of all Stoics. The subject line was no more informative. READ THIS was all it said.
He opened it.
There was an audio file attached to the message. Under the link were words that sent a chill down the back of Sam’s spine. No evil is honorable; but death is honorable. Therefore, death is not evil. It was a famous syllogism, one of the few surviving quotes attributed directly to Zeno.
The café did not have headphones to rent, but they had them for sale. Sam bought a pair and plugged them into the computer. He hesitated before clicking the link. Maybe it was a trap of some kind that would immediately broadcast his location to the Morlocks. Maybe he should talk this over with Earl first. Sam knew he could not wait. He opened the link.
A marble bust of a bearded man that Sam assumed was Zeno appeared on the screen.
“Mr. Trainor. Listen carefully. The reason we have two ears and only one mouth is that we may hear more and speak less.
“We congratulate you on your survival. You are a resourceful individual. This is a character trait that we respect and admire. You are also, however, something of a problem for us. Your understanding of morality is immature. It is micro rather than macro. You do not see the big picture and you do not appreciate that our society is made safe by those who make the difficult choices. This is a trait that we neither respect nor admire.”
The voice was computer-generated or electronically distorted in some way. If it was Spears or Weeder or one of the other Morlocks, Sam could not recognize the voice. Even so, he recognized the sentiment. These were the same principles as those behind the trolleyology questions Spears had posed to him in a conversation that seemed a lifetime in the past.
“You have seen a piece of a complex picture,” the voice continued. “We understand how this can be disorienting. We bear you no ill will. To do so would be at odds with the logic of the current situation. Neither, however, can we trust you with the fragment of information that you have uncovered. This would be equally foolish. You are a distraction from our purpose. We will not hesitate to eliminate this distraction, but will not focus disproportionate resources on managing it. We believe that we have found an acceptable balance of risk.”
It was hard for Sam to fully appreciate that he was the abstract “distraction” the voice was discussing so dispassionately. The car crash on the parkway that nearly killed him was, to the Stoics, merely an attempt to remove a minor irritant.
“We have secured an insurance policy. Your daughter, Lena, is currently in our custody. Please be assured that we are treating her well and courteously. She is healthy and unharmed, and she will remain so as long as you do nothing that we would consider threatening in any way. We do not think that you will be at all confused as to what sort of actions might constitute a threat. If in doubt, we recommend that you err on the side of caution.
“Once our objectives have been achieved, we will turn attention to the issue of our future relationship.
“We understand that you will want proof of life. That is not unreasonable.” The head of Zeno morphed into Lena. There was no background, just a still shot of Lena’s head and shoulders against a black background.
“Papa Bear.” It was her voice and Sam felt his throat constrict. His girl was in danger and it was his fault.
“I’m okay,” she continued. “They won’t let me tell you anything more than that, but they haven’t hurt me. I love you, Papa Bear.”
The marble Zeno replaced the image of his daughter.
“Good-bye, Mr. Trainor,” the voice said. “And remember these words from Zeno of Citium. ‘Love is a god, who cooperates in securing the safety of the city.’”
The bust of Zeno disappeared from the screen.
Sam wanted to explode. He wanted to rip the computer from its mount on the desktop and throw it across the room. If Spears or Weeder walked into the café at that moment, he knew that he would launch himself at the ex-SEALs with murderous intent.
They had his daughter. They would pay for this. There would be an accounting.
Despite the blithe reassurances from the voice that if he did nothing Lena would be released unharmed, Sam knew in his bones that they would kill her. Then they would kill him. For the Stoics, for Argus, this was the tidiest solution. Why not kill them? It was safer that way.
Sam would not sit and wait. He would go after them, even if he did not yet know how.
To start with, he wanted to listen to the message again to see if there was anything he had missed. But when he went to click on the link, he saw that the e-mail had disappeared. It had erased itself from the screen, and Sam knew that there would be no record anywhere of the message ever having been sent.
“Hang in there, baby,” he whispered to himself. “I’m coming for you.”
Sam felt a complex mix of emotions. Fear and anger were the top notes, but they overlaid a deep reservoir of love for his only child and something else. Parental pride. His little girl had been captured by killers and she had already got the better of them. She had told Sam where she was.
DALLAS, TEXAS
NOVEMBER 22, 1963
The kill zone was smaller than he would have liked. There was no getting around that. He did not want the tip of the rifle to be visible from the street. Neither could he risk the muzzle flash, so he was set up almost ten feet back from the open window. The weapon was not ideal either. It was an older-model rifle and foreign, a balky bolt-action Italian design. But he had zeroed it carefully at an isolated spot in the hill scrub outside of town. For the distance at issue, it would serve.
He had been waiting for more than four hours in the small, stifling room. The target was behind schedule. In the enervating heat, it was hard to stay alert and focused. Looking through the sights of his rifle, he scanned the narrow kill zone one more time. An American flag hanging from a lamppost made for a suitable wind gauge. There was a light breeze from the northwest. Not enough to affect the trajectory of the bullet. A sizeable crowd had gathered along the parade route to welcome the target. He was a politician running for reelection. He would want to be seen. The target would be riding in an open-top vehicle. There would be security, of course, the best in the world. But there was little enough that even the best bodyguards could do against a skilled man and a high-velocity rifle.
He was not worried about the shot itself. He was an expert marksman who had learned the basics of his trade in the U.S. Marine Corps. Of greater concern was the reaction of the security detail after the shot. Getting away was at least as important to the mission as getting the kill.
It was the crowd that alerted him to the imminent arrival of the target. The civilians lining both sides of Elm Street cheered and small children were waving miniature American flags.
He pulled a small pair of binoculars out of a leather case and focused in on one particular man standing on the grassy knoll that overlooked Dealey Plaza. His spotter. The man held three fingers up in front of his chest. Three hundred yards. Two fingers. Two hundred yards.
The sniper turned his attention back to the rifle and sighted on the kill zone. The open-topped limousine traveled at a slow and constant pace. It was not an especially difficult shot. He lined the sights up on the back of the target’s head and squeezed the trigger. His first shot was a little low, hitting the target in the neck. He ejected the empty shell case and fed another bullet into the breech, working the bolt carefully to minimize the risk of a jam. His second shot was dead-on, blowing out the top of President Kennedy’s head and spraying his brains over his wife and the other passengers in the car.
Mission accomplished.
The passenger in the front seat of the Lincoln Continental was down as well. It looked like Governor Connally. That was not his shot. The sniper had heard the distinctive crack of a high-velocity round in between his two shots. There was a second gunman. That hadn’t been a part of the plan briefed to him, but Smith kept his cards close and it was possible that taking down the governor was part of a parallel operation that was piggybacking on his. It was a little irritating that Smith hadn’t told him about the second gunman, but it was not a real problem.
He laid the rifle on the floor near the window and stripped off the surgical gloves he had worn every time he had handled it. The gloves were likely the reason his first shot had been a little low. They made it hard to establish a connection with the rifle, to make it part of his body. But they also meant that the only fingerprints on the gun would be those of its owner—one Lee Harvey Oswald.
The nut job Oswald would take the blame for the death of the president . . . and the credit for what had been a fine piece of shooting. Such was life in the shadows.
Oswald himself would need to be eliminated, of course, but that was not his responsibility. That was Smith’s assignment. Whether Oswald’s life was measured in hours or days, he was not long for this world. And unlike Kennedy, he would die unmourned.
The president’s killer took the stairs two at a time down six flights and did not look back as he left the Texas School Book Depository behind him.
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
APRIL 24
Officially, it was NFATC, or the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center. But nobody ever called it that. It was FSI. This was the older acronym for the Foreign Service Institute, the training center for America’s diplomats.
FSI was like a little college campus of yellow- and redbrick buildings set just off Route 50 in Arlington, Virginia, no more than three miles from the main State Department building in Foggy Bottom. It was crowded. As with many government projects, the population of FSI had outgrown the facilities even before they opened.
This was where America’s newly minted diplomats came for training and indoctrination in a six-week program that had a long bureaucratic name but was colloquially known as A-100. The “100” was a reference to the room in the old State, War, and Navy Building at Seventeenth and G Street where the first class of diplomats selected by competitive examination had met for orientation in 1926. The “A” was added sometime in the 1940s to indicate that it was part of the school’s “advanced” program of studies. Courses in the “basic” program began with a “B.” That distinction had disappeared over the decades, but A-100 remained A-100 and Foreign Service officers kept track of their classmates over the years as a kind of informal yardstick for measuring their own progress in the long, slow climb up the rigid and unforgiving State Department hierarchy.
A-100 was still the beating heart of FSI, but language training was the school’s primary mission. The vast majority of students were at FSI to learn the language of their next assignment. Sam had done his A-100 orientation before NFATC had opened up, but he had spent ten months as a student here learning Urdu before his assignment to Lahore.
The school taught nearly every major language on the planet. Students were given five or six months to learn a relatively “easy” language such as Spanish or Italian and ten months to learn more difficult languages such as Vietnamese or Hungarian. A handful of “super hard” languages—Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic—were two-year programs with the second year spent overseas as a full-time student. Language skills, particularly for more obscure languages such as Georgian or Khmer, set the U.S. Foreign Service apart from most other diplomatic services.
The other big training program at FSI was consular tradecraft, or ConGen. This was where new consular officers learned the ins and outs of visa processing and immigration law. They also practiced interviewing visa applicants, role-played various scenarios involving Americans in distress overseas, and learned everything they needed to know about U.S. passports.
It was this last responsibility that interested Sam. It was the reason he had risked coming back to Arlington, to a facility that was no more than a mile and a half from the headquarters of Argus Systems.
If he was going to get to India, he would need a passport. He had two of them, a standard blue tourist passport and a black diplomatic passport. Both were in the desk drawer in the second-floor study of his Capitol Hill townhouse. It was all too likely that the Morlocks were watching his house. Even if he was somehow able to get his passports, it would have been easy for Spears or Weeder to either cancel his travel documents or flag them in the system to trigger an alert if he bought a ticket for international travel. Since 9/11, all of the various databases had been linked together, which made the country safer but also made the system easier to manipulate. Compared to what Argus had already done, keeping tabs on Sam’s passports was child’s play.
He needed a new passport, and Earl Holly had told him that this was something he could not help him with. Earl knew document forgers, of course, but the introduction of biometric passports with digital chips linked to the government’s various security databases had complicated the business. Sam would have had to start over, creating a new identity, beginning with a forged or stolen birth certificate, and then applying for a new passport in his new name. It could be done, but it would take time. Time that Sam could not afford.
If Sam could not use his own passport and he could not get a new one, then, he reasoned, he would have to make one.
“How can I help you?” The woman sitting behind the reception desk at the front entrance to FSI was black and somewhat heavyset. She was wearing a Diplomatic Security uniform, a white shirt, and a police-style peaked cap with the DS eagle-and-shield logo on the band. And although he could not see it, Sam knew that she was also wearing a wide leather belt holding a 9mm pistol and a pair of handcuffs.
“I’m a new student in ConGen,” Sam explained, “and I’m afraid that I left my badge at home.”
“Can I see some ID, please.”
“Sure.” Sam handed her a Tennessee driver’s license issued in the name of William J. Christiansen. Earl Holly knew a guy in Nashville who had gotten Sam the license in a couple of hours. “It’ll work as picture ID,” the man had told him, “but I wouldn’t recommend using it if you get stopped by the cops. It won’t pass that kind of test. There’d be no record in the DMV database.”
Fortunately, FSI was considered a low-risk facility. ID checks were cursory. The DS officer typed the name and date of birth from the driver’s license into the computer. There was a record for a Foreign Service officer named William J. Christiansen with that DOB in the system. He was Sam’s classmate from A-100, currently serving as deputy chief of mission in Vientiane, Laos, which was about as far off the beaten track as you could get. Sam remembered Bill’s birthday. It was exactly two days and two years earlier than Sam’s. During training, they had organized a joint birthday party that had resulted in a memorable hangover. He had borrowed Bill’s identity for the express purpose of gaining entry to FSI.
The logbook was still pen-and-paper. The guard wrote his name and license number in the book and asked Sam to sign it. She handed him a blue temporary badge that identified him as a student.
FSI was so open that it posted its course calendar online.
ConGen was offering a course on passports for new consular officers at ten o’clock. It was now nine forty-five. The guard at the main door just to the left of the reception desk looked at his badge and waved him through.
ConGen was in C Building on the other side of an open expanse called the Quad. Every year, flocks of migrating Canada geese adopted the grassy Quad as a temporary refuge on their long flights north and south, forcing urbanized diplomats to learn the origins of the rural expression “like shit through a goose.” Their substantial droppings littered the Quad and the geese were unimpressed by the cardboard cutouts of foxes and coyotes that the grounds crew had set up in a desperate attempt to protect their carefully manicured lawn.
They were losing more than that battle. The pathways were designed to force students to walk around the edge of the Quad to get from building to building. But generations of otherwise law-abiding diplomats had carved an informal path of hard-packed dirt that led directly from the front entrance to C Building. Sam had used this rogue path on his way to Urdu lessons. It was a minor—and completely satisfying—act of defiance.
“Sam!”
Fuck.
This was one of the risks he took in coming here. The Service was small and the odds of running into someone he knew were high. It was why he had tried to time his arrival closely to the start of the passport class.
He turned around.
“Hi, Roger. How’s tricks?” Roger Browley was never going to set the world on fire. He had been the supervisory general services officer in New Delhi when Sam had been posted to the embassy almost twelve years ago. The GSO ran the motor pool, paid the bills, and kept the embassy’s physical plant running. It was not terribly exciting, but then neither was Browley.
“Keeping busy. We’re off to Kenya in July. I’ll be the head of budget and fiscal for all of East Africa.”
Secrets of State Page 26