Black Tide

by Brendan DuBois

  Though at this point I would be happy if all that ever happened was that the Exonia Hospital would move their fashion show somewhere else. But something tickled at me, something that had to with the FBI. And when I started browsing through the printout that I had stolen days ago from the Puzzle Palace while I was in the state of New York, it came to me, on the very last page of Cameron Briggs's printout.

  It made me smile. Tomorrow I would get my revenge against the legal world at the expense of a phone call or two, and that seemed to be a hell of an achievement.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It had taken me about an hour and a half to get here on this Tuesday morning, to Maine's largest city --- Portland --- and I expected my time here wouldn't last as long as the trip back. Once there I parked on the restored waterfront --- Portland wisely having followed the path of its older but smaller sister city Porter to the south --- and I walked past a number of restaurants and brick buildings that contained lawyers' offices and consulting groups. There was a ferry landing if I wanted to take the ocean route to Nova Scotia later that afternoon, but on this muggy day, I had other work to do.

  At a phone booth near a marina, I took out a roll of quarters and a folded sheet of paper, and I started dialing. The piece of paper was the last printout in Cameron Briggs's Department of Defense file, and this is what it said:

  Cameron Briggs (Criminal Investigations)

  See Op Harpoon

  JD Files

  J. Carney/Contact JD

  File Number: OC-NE-423

  In the times I had looked over Cameron Briggs's file, I had skipped across this jumble of words and letters, not knowing what they meant, until I had thought yesterday about the FBI, and their titular boss, the Attorney General, who headed up the Department of Justice. Or the Justice Department, depending on how you said it. JD, then.

  I spent a couple of minutes on the phone with Information and other folks and after I pumped in a number of quarters, the phone rang and a quick, professional man's voice said, "Justice Department, Criminal Division."

  "Mr. Carney's office," I said. "One moment."

  There was a clicking and a distant ringing, and a woman's voice answered. "Mr. Carney's office."

  "Morning," I said. "This is Ron Allan calling, Protocol Office at the State Department. I have Mr. Carney's name here on an invitation list for a reception in September. Could you verify the spelling of his last name, please?"

  "Certainly," the woman said, and she did.

  “And his first name? I'm sorry, but this list is handwritten, and all I can make out is the first letter. A 'J.' You know how it is."

  The woman laughed for a moment and said, "I certainly do. Mr. Carney's first name is John, but everyone who knows him well calls him Jack. "

  ''And his title?"

  "Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Special Investigations."

  "Jeez, sounds like he's been there for a while."

  "Oh, he has. About four or five years."

  "Thanks a lot," I said, and she said it was no problem, no doubt thinking she was assisting another secret ally in the bureaucratic world of D.C. And who was I to shatter her illusions?

  Although it was past the noon hour, I didn't have much appetite for lunch, and I just wandered around the port area for a while. I walked down one pier and sat on the old wood, looking at a large, rusting oil tanker at a pier on the other side of the harbor, shadowed by cranes and other pieces of equipment. On the stern were the letters PETRO STAR and below that, in smaller white letters, was MONROVIA. I just sat there, breathing and thinking, looking for the first time at the ship that had brought me here and to New York City and other places. Before I got depressed, I left the dock and spent a marvelous half hour in an antiques store that had old navigational maps, formatted and framed, and polished brass work with little placards that claimed the gear had been pulled up by divers from wrecks in the Gulf of Maine. There was an old compass that I thought would look great in the living room, but I had to pass it up. Money was no problem, but in paying for this old antique, I would have to use a credit card and that was not possible. I didn't want any records of my being in Portland on this Tuesday.

  When it was about a half hour past noon, I went back to the same phone booth --- having been lucky the first time around, I thought it wouldn't hurt to try again --- and I dialed the same number, and again spoke the magic words: "Mr. Carney's office."

  This time, I got a different woman answering the phone. Her voice sounded younger and bit unsure, which I had been counting on. It being lunchtime, Jack Carney's regular secretary would be gone, replaced by someone who was a temporary or someone in a secretarial pool who wasn't experienced and who might be easily flustered.

  Which I hoped.

  "Yeah," I said, deepening and hurrying my voice. "Could you put Jack on the line? This is Greg Samson, from the House Subcommittee on Crime."

  "Urn, could I have your name again?"

  I muttered something like I couldn't believe the incompetence of certain hired help, and repeated my name, louder. ''And could you hurry it up? I'm already late for a meeting with the congressman. "

  She murmured something back, and in a moment a man's voice came on the line. "This is Carney."

  "Hi, Jack, this is Greg Samson," I said. "I don't know if you remember me, but we met a couple of months ago, at that AG's party in Bethesda." Given the current Attorney General's fondness for parties --- as reported in the papers --- I was gambling that Jack Carney would have been there. I was right, since Carney said, "Unh-hunh."

  And I continued with, "I'm a staff assistant on the House Subcommittee on Crime, and I need to have a quick question answered, and then I'll leave you alone."

  Carney sounded slightly cautious. "Well, Greg, this is generally not the way things are done. Why don't you write up the request and put it through channels?"

  "You're absolutely right, Jack, but I thought this would save us both some time. I got an inquiry from Congressman Hughes, the subcommittee chairman, about an investigation that he heard something about, and he just wanted to know what it entailed. He wants something quick, and I thought if you could give me a brief rundown, it would save me time, it would save you and your staff time, and that would be the end of it."

  "What's the investigation?"

  "Something called Operation Harpoon. It's a few years old, and he thinks it took place in the New England area. I guess some constituent's got some questions about it."

  "Mmm," came his voice. "That sounds familiar. Let me get to the files here. Hold on."

  He put the phone down on his desk I grasped the phone receiver tighter, feeling the slick plastic slippery in my hand. Long minutes stretched by, and my breathing seemed to slow. Then came that clattering noise when someone picks up a phone, and I thought to myself, Lewis you are one very bad boy. And very bright.

  "Operation Harpoon," Carney said. ''An eighteen-month investigation, centered in eastern Massachusetts. Coding here says it was a corruption case. Investigation ended about six, seven years ago. No resolution, no arrests, no convictions. Case closed out."

  “What kind of corruption was it looking into?"

  "Let's see," came the voice of Jack Carney, and in the next three seconds I learned that while I might have been a bad boy, I certainly wasn't very bright.

  A couple of tourists near me were walking across Commercial Street, and an oil tanker nearly clipped them, and in doing so, the driver of the truck slammed on his brakes and leaned on his air horn. The screech of brakes and the bellow of the horn seemed to blast right through my head, and Carney's voice changed.

  "Uh, Greg?" Carney said. "Could I put you on hold for a moment?"

  "Sure, Jack," I replied, and I hung up on him. I took out a handkerchief, wiped down the phone, and walked two blocks to my Range Rover. I thought about what might be going through Jack Carney's head right about now. All he knew was that someone from a pay phone had been scamming him, looking for information ab
out Operation Harpoon, and then had hung up on him, not bothering to wait around for a phone trace. It made me wonder what kind of guy Jack Carney was. If he was embarrassed about the scam, he might keep it a secret and get on with his life. But if he was angry --- or worse, curious --- then he might do some digging.

  I drove back to New Hampshire on back roads, avoiding the main highways wherever I could. As I headed south, I wondered was just being paranoid, on the road to insanity, but in remembering other places I had been, my actions seemed fairly sane and quite logical.

  Before working in what we called the Marginal Issues Section of the DoD, I had bounced around other departments and sections for a number of months, gaining experience and building up a little knowledge of what I had gotten into. The year I joined up, the DoD did this for some of us new folks to give us what they called "depth and breadth" of knowledge. You were usually assigned to some senior official for a week or two, and then moved on. They called it the Mentor Program, and God knows if it's still being used. I rather doubted it, since my exposure --- in a few instances --- had been incredibly dull (most bureaucrats being the same everywhere), but in one memorable instance, exquisitely terrifying.

  The man's name had been Grayson. He wouldn't tell me his first name, saying, "Young fella, by the time you get high enough up the ladder to have earned the respect to know my first namc, I'll either be dead or getting a sunburn in Puerto Rico, working on my retirement." He smoked unfiltered Camels, wore government-issue eyeglasses, and had an undying hatred and fear of all sorts of enemies, both foreign and domestic. In the first few days I was with him, he had said, "Don't take offense, sonny, but I think this Mentor Program is an absolute waste of time. Sounds like something that a damn fool Democratic congresswoman from Colorado thought up. So you just stay out of my way."

  Staying out of his way meant sitting in his outer office, reading newspapers and feeling out of place for the first day, until he tossed me a book and said, "Here, read this." It was E. B. Sledge's horrifying account of being a Marine in two of the worst Pacific battles in World War II --- With the Old Breed --- and when Grayson saw that I had finished that in a day, he gave me a couple more books to read. William Manchester's Goodbye, Darkness. Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War. And a work of fiction by James Webb, Fields of Fire. After my fourth day with him, Grayson took me for a cup of coffee at one of the half dozen or so snack bars in the five-sided palace and said, "Whatever you end up doing here, young fella, remember this bottom line. It all comes down to two things: killing somebody else and protecting your own. Everything else is fluff. You can work in public affairs or research or with those corrupt contractors or whatever, but it all comes down to this. You're working to kill people you've never met, and you're also working equally hard to protect people you've never met, but who also happen to be your neighbors. Nothing else matters. Read those books again in a few months. They tell the real story of guys --- and now women, God help us --- who are sent far away to do our bidding. Sometimes orders get fouled up. Sometimes they get nitwits for bosses. And sometimes their gear doesn't work, because some business guy's only interested in screwing the government."

  He finished his coffee. "Remember that," and I always have. I also remembered one more thing with Grayson. One day he told me to be at work early and then we went for a drive, using a stripped Chrysler that belonged to the DoD motor pool. He just said one thing as we headed to our destination, and that was this: “I have it on good authority that you're going into some type of research and analysis work. You may find this interesting."

  After some long minutes of driving, we ended up in Maryland, in a suburban community. We drove up an unmarked driveway and we showed our identification cards to a gatehouse guard who wore a simple blue uniform that said "Security" on its shoulder patches. The uniform looked as if it belonged to a retired cop or a college student, but the guard looked like an ex-Marine who wished he were back in the service. The building we went to was a featureless concrete-and-metal cube, and after some more negotiations with guards and two elevator rides, I think we ended up in a basement. As we processed through, Grayson smiled at a man about his age and said, "Thanks for the favor, Tom.”

  "No problem, Colonel," the man said, and I felt a bit uneasy. I had come to the conclusion earlier that Grayson was a bit of a nut, heading off to retirement with some strange thoughts about books and government service, but the respect he was being shown in this building changed my mind. We were given badges that said "Visitor" to wear around our necks on thin chains, but Grayson's was light blue while mine was red. We were both visitors, but as George Orwell might have said, some visitors are more equal than others.

  In the basement we went into a small viewing gallery that overlooked a row of consoles and some large screens on a near wall. There were plush chairs in the gallery and a coffee setup in the rear, and we sat down, coffee cups in hand. The gallery was open, so we could hear the murmur of voices and sounds from below. The largest screen in the center of the room was blank, but then it flickered into focus, and it became an aerial picture of a highway along an ocean coast. The highway was nearly empty, but the waves were moving in to the rocky shore, so it wasn't a static shot. Grayson leaned over to me and said, "In case you're wondering, this is live time."

  "Where is it?"

  Grayson chuckled. "Well, of course, that's classified. But I'll tell you. It's the coastal highway near a town called Barranquilla, on the road to Cartagena, Colombia. On the road is a certain drug lord, hurrying to Cartagena to see his mistress. This gentleman has unusual tastes, which his mistress is all too glad to satisfy. For a price, of course. This gentleman's mistress has been in Europe on a shopping expedition for two weeks, and has just returned. So he's driving back to get, well, he's driving back to get reacquainted. "

  The murmur of voices from the workers below us grew a bit louder, and the view of the highway and ocean rotated a bit and tightened in on a stretch of road. There were four dark-colored vehicles there, moving in a single line. They all looked like Ford Broncos.

  "Where's the picture coming from?" I asked. "Satellite?"

  "On some days you'd be right, but not today," Grayson said. "This is one of our new surveillance platforms." He paused and smiled again. "Everyone's heard of the Stealth fighter and the Stealth bomber. But why does everybody think we've stopped there? Don't you think there'd be times when we'd want to take good live-time pictures without being noticed? Look now."

  The road curved a bit, near an outcropping of some rocks that were awash with water and foam from the waves. A flash of light winked from the rocks and the lead Bronco disappeared in a bigger flash of light and a ballooning cloud of smoke. The other three Broncos swerved and braked, but in a matter of seconds, there were four burning hulks on this bright morning on this coastal highway in Colombia. Armed men in camouflage gear came out from the rocks, moving swiftly and surely. Some of the survivors from the Broncos tried to fight. Others tried to run away, and a couple were crawling. It didn't make much of a difference one way or another. I turned away a few times, not wanting to see what was going on. My mouth was dry, and it came to me, in a way that almost made me laugh with disgust, that I was in a room thousands of miles away, yet I had a comfortable and safe ringside view of at least a couple of dozen people being killed.

  I finally said, "No prisoners?"

  Grayson replied, "That wasn't the point. I don't think the public or news media have gotten wind of this, but here are our new marching orders. We've gone beyond sanctions, extradition treaties and burning crops, Lewis. It's something a lot dirtier and tougher. This isn't a matter of taking prisoners away for a trial somewhere so they can end up in a plush prison cell with color TV. This is a lot more final."

  On the screen the armed men had gone to the side of the road. Two of them exchanged high-five salutes. The four Broncos continued to burn, and there were little lumps of clothing along the asphalt and roadside that used to be people. Then two helicopters came int
o view ---black and unmarked --- and in seconds they had landed and taken on the group of armed men. In another few seconds the helicopters were gone, leaving behind the rubble of an early morning drive. The screen flickered and then went out. A couple of people below me clapped. I felt like throwing up. Later this would change, as I read and learned more about my new line of work, but at that moment I was afraid that my coffee would end up on Grayson's shoes.

  "Was this a lesson?" I said, my voice demanding, looking squarely at Grayson. ''A lesson on how dirty I can expect my job to be?"

  Grayson looked surprised. "Oh, it was a lesson, all right, Lewis, but not the one you're thinking of. I left one thing out when I was telling you about the drug lord and his mistress. Up to now this particular gentleman was using encrypted telephone gear, some of the latest stuff from his friends in Cuba. So we never knew where he was going or what he was doing, through the telephone at least."

  Grayson rubbed the coffee cup for a moment. "Today, he made one mistake. He let his libido overtake his good sense, and he made one phone call in the clear. Uuencoded. And we snapped that right up." He turned to me, his white skin even more pale in the artificial light. "Do you understand what I'm saying, Lewis? One phone call and we were there. We've got this little globe of ours wired, my young fellow, and don't you ever forget it. We've got satellites and listening ships and mobile vans and remote sensing units all over this planet. This time, some nut spoke in the clear and we were on him in an hour. One phone call, in the clear. Don't you forget that."