Cold Frame

by P. T. Deutermann

  “I’m the one who handed over some rather exotic materials to your office at the request of a man named Kyle Strang,” Hiram said. “Supposedly in support of the War on Terror, as orchestrated by the DMX committee. You, on the other hand, are the man who took those materials and used them to kill two members of that committee because they lost faith in the entire concept of DMX. I can tell any forensic pathologist who wants to know precisely what killed those two men.”

  “Then that makes you part of this, too,” Mandeville said, triumphantly.

  “In your dreams, Mister Mandeville,” Miller said. “He’s on our side.” Then he turned to the other agents. “Get him to the nearest trauma center. Tight custody. No communications allowed. None, got it? When they’re done with him, take him to Quantico to the BSU, isolate him under guard, and wait for my instructions.”

  The agents began to steer Mandeville toward one of the SUVs, but Hiram Walker stepped in front of them. He took the little white carnation out of his boutonniere slit and pinned it into Mandeville’s breast pocket. “Just a reminder, Mister Mandeville, in case you think I’d forgotten you. Consider it a memento.”

  Hiram then turned around and made his way back up the hill toward his waiting vehicle. Av thought he was moving slower than before. Maybe it was the hill.

  Mandeville made to brush the white flower out of his pocket, but the agents had a firm grip on both his elbows. They led him over to one of the SUVs and made him take the center seat in the back. One of them handcuffed each of his wrists to a strap running across the back of the front seat, and then put on his seat belt. Av’s last sight of him was of that big face grimacing in pain and Olympic anger as one of the agents closed the back door.

  “Okay,” Miller said. “I think we’re done here. Ellen, if you would take your helpers back to town, I’ll go ahead to Quantico and set things up with Behavioral Sciences.” Then he turned to Av and his partners. “Gentlemen, Special Agent Whiting will explain things to you in due course, and I will personally smooth over any problems this case may have caused for you at MPD. That’s a promise. Your Bureau thanks you very, very much.”

  “My Bureau?” Wong said softly as Miller joined the other agents at the second SUV. Mau-Mau snorted.

  “Let’s go, boys,” Ellen said. “The detective sergeant here’s had a long night, and I need a drink. Or three.”

  “Three’s good,” Wong said. “Four’s better. Man! That was nice shooting.”

  Miz Brown positively beamed.

  * * *

  “Okay, let’s start with this stalking horse business,” Av said.

  The four of them were sitting in his loft apartment; Miz Brown had decided to go home after shooting up Mandeville’s hands. He’d said he needed to pray on it. Av had thanked him profusely, but Brown had waved his thanks aside. “Don’t like to do that, shooting someone like that,” he said. “Had to be done, I know, but I still feel bad about it.”

  “You hadn’t, I wouldn’t be feeling anything,” Av had reminded him.

  “But you would be with the Lord,” Brown had said, with a suitably beatific smile.

  Ellen had Scotch; Av and his partners were drinking beer. Ellen explained the concept of a stalking horse as something done to draw out someone who would otherwise never show his hand. “Political parties do it in primaries,” she said. “Put up some nobody candidate to see what the opposition’s going to do, or how strong their own candidate is.”

  “I get that,” Av said. “But why’d you need one to deal with Mandeville?”

  “Two reasons,” she said. “One, you’ve heard people talk about the White House as the Bubble. Totally protected. Totally insulated. Secret Service. Building guards. Military snipers and antiaircraft weapons on the roof. Armored transport. Top-flight secure communications. Bunkers. Undisclosed locations, around the city and elsewhere. Jumbo-jet airplanes. Helicopters. No-fly zones—the list just goes on and on.”

  “But that’s all for the President.”

  “Yeah, but it covers some of the senior staff, too, right? A guy like Mandeville, a senior presidential advisor? He’s in that bubble, too. You can not get at a guy like that unless you can draw him out of that Kevlar bubble.”

  “What’s the second reason?” Mau-Mau asked.

  “The Bureau knew about the dissent within the DMX. It wasn’t until I had that lunch with McGavin and then a little recap session with Mandeville that we realized how out-there this was getting. Problem was that Mandeville tricked me into being involved in what happened to McGavin. That gave him a pretty big stick to use on the Bureau if we did do something official.”

  Bureau involvement, Av thought. Right. Now he understood. “How’d the Bureau even know?”

  “I told my boss some of the things Mandeville was saying. He’s known to be a crusader for the DMX, so, yes, it was extreme, but no one ever thought he’d start killing people.”

  Av blew out a long breath. “So: CT equals no rules, then.”

  Ellen shrugged. “I think,” she said, “that they truly believe the CT effort is so important, so vital to the survival of the country, that the everyday laws don’t always apply. I mean, for God’s sake, look at the DMX.”

  “And the fact that there are eighty-plus agencies makes it easier for them to do that,” Av said. “So why me, and who knew?”

  “Second question first—we called Precious in and told her what we were thinking about doing. Let her see a videotape of Mandeville going off on some of his own staff for some mortal sin or other. It was persuasive, right down to the tufts of fire coming out of his temples and the blue light of madness in his eyes. She bought right in. Said you’d be perfect, ’cause you’d never catch on.”

  “Well, thank you, Precious.” Av snorted. “And all those heavy dudes out on the towpath?”

  “Those were Mandeville’s people, or, rather, Strang’s. He’s still a loose end. He was the man in charge of the other side of that Chinese wall. We had no frigging idea we had a twenty-six-year Agency CO operative working as a GS-7 in the basement. Or why he was there. We only got onto him because Mandeville had to use one of our ciphers to call in to the headquarters building. If he’d used the White House system, we’d have never known.”

  “And he was the guy Hiram gave the joy juice to?”

  “No,” she said. “That was three years ago. Hiram remembered him, because he already knew about the special plants. Strang wanted the plants, actually, but Hiram didn’t trust him.”

  “Okay, okay, wait a minute,” Mau-Mau interjected. “All these people knowin’ everything, everybody plottin’ and schemin’, walking right through those Chinese walls and shit—everybody just one step ahead of everybody else: how they doin’ that?”

  Ellen sipped some of her Scotch. “You read the Snowden revelations?” she asked. “About how the government is listening—hell, not just listening, but recording—every phone conversation and e-mail and text and IM and, fuck me, tweet in the country, if not the world? Lemme explain something: at every DMX meeting, a rep from the NSA stands up and gives us a briefing. He calls it the nugget brief. He talks about the nuggets of interesting information they glean from all that listening. You know what that rep told me one day? He said: we are the Cloud.”

  “Holy shit,” Mau-Mau muttered.

  “Well, it’s true. You put it out there, someone sees it. Guy like Mandeville? He knew how to get at some of that information, and how to have a funny-looking flower vendor show up in the Bistro Nord and entice me to buy a nice bouquet of flowers, which he placed right under McGavin’s nose. A minute later McGavin was dead on the floor, and—and—when the cops and the fake EMTs arrived, did anyone mention flowers?”

  “So you told Mandeville that I was working the McGavin incident?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Strang did that. Told Mandeville where the case was being handled. Mandeville told him to see if he could deflect you and the rest of the guys in the Briar Patch. Hence the fake-FPS stunt on the towpath.”<
br />
  “But the FPS actually called our bosses and bitched about that,” Mau-Mau said.

  “No, they didn’t,” Ellen said. “We checked—FPS didn’t know what we were talking about.”

  Mau-Mau shook his head. Av suddenly wanted some of Ellen’s Scotch.

  Wong announced that he was hungry, and did anyone else feel like some Chinese chow. The other three looked at each other and said yes.

  “So everything after that, you guys were running it?” Av said.

  “We were running you,” she said. “It was perfect. Mandeville could not believe that some cop in an office known as the Briar Patch was poking his nose into anything that was going on at his level. He called the deputy director of the Bureau, Mister Ederington, and told him to have you picked up by a tactical squad and sequestered in the special facility down in Petersburg. Matter of utmost urgency. FISA court warrant to follow. Can’t explain it over the phone, even over a secure phone. Presidential interest. DMX related. Just do it.”

  “And just like that, he did?”

  “No, actually,” she said. “When he heard ‘DMX’ he called my boss in and said WTF. We took it from there, called the colonel in charge down there, and then got Wong, here, to spring you out of there and begin the chain of events that, hopefully, would result in Mandeville coming up out of his lair and going for you, personally. That was the only way we figured we could get him.”

  “Why did I end up at Hiram’s?” Av asked.

  “I spent some time with Hiram,” she said. “He showed me his research facility, explained how he’d helped the government before, and why he’d given Mandeville the materials. It was his idea to get you out there, as bait for Mandeville. I think he wanted to see what his little plant arsenal could do.”

  “It, by God, did the job,” Av said.

  “And then he set you loose on the river.”

  “Yeah, where fucking Mandeville’s operators were waiting and watching. Jesus, Ellen, they could have just offed me in the helo and thrown my ass into that rotor thing at Little Falls Dam.”

  She smiled. “That was the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team,” she said. “Believe it or not, Mandeville called Strang and told him that he wanted you picked up at Hiram’s estate. Strang, God bless him, told Mandeville to call in the HRT—with White House authority, they’d do what he wanted, and bring you to wherever Mandeville said. The HRT boss called my boss to ask who this Mandeville guy was, calling in on a White House phone. My boss called me, and we saw our chance.”

  “And why did you involve the Briar Patch in the first place?” Av asked. “You got the whole FBI to call on.”

  She smiled again, with the hint of a blush in it. “My boss said to get you guys to front the operation. That way, if it all turned to shit, the Bureau could say: Who, me?”

  The doorbell rang and Wong went to the front door, fumbling with his wallet. He peered through the peephole. White guy, holding up bags. He opened the door.

  “So,” Av continued. “Did you roll up Strang and whoever he was using?”

  “No,” she said. “We have no idea where Strang is.”

  “Oh, I think we do,” Wong said, backing into the room, followed by Kyle Strang, carrying an H & K MP5 A2, with which he was casually covering the entire room.

  “Aw, shit,” Mau-Mau said. “Where’s the damn chow?”

  “Just outside the door,” Strang said. “I paid the delivery guy. Back up, King Kong.”

  Wong backed away from the door and then went over to the couch, where he sat down next to Ellen and put on his best glare. Strang didn’t appear to notice.

  “You people need to just relax,” Strang said, dropping into one of the living room chairs. “This thing’s for my protection, not for you. I need to fill you in on a couple of things, that’s all, so don’t anybody get stupid on me or we’ll have a terrible accident here. Hello, Ellen Whiting.”

  “One moment,” Av said. He’d been sitting in a chair close to the couch. He got up now, put a finger to his lips in Strang’s direction, and went over to the couch, where he appropriated what was left of Ellen’s Scotch in one gulp. Then he went back to his chair, sat down, and said: “Shoot. So to speak, I mean.”

  Strang snorted. “Okay,” he said. “First things first. I work for the Central Intelligence Agency, and have done so for almost three decades.”

  “So what are you doing in the audiovisual section of the Bureau?” Av asked.

  “I’ll get to that,” Strang said. “Just as soon as I tell you that I had nothing to do with either McGavin or Logan shuffling off this mortal coil.”

  “Bullshit,” Ellen said. “Hiram Walker told me you came to him personally to get your hands on some of his more dangerous plants.”

  “Yes, I did,” Strang said. “And you know what? He said no. Actually, what he said was: ‘Let me think about that, Mister Strang. I will need to consult with my colleagues in the society. But, on balance, I think we might be able to help you.’ That’s what he said.”

  “And then, later, he turned you down?”

  “He did,” Strang said. “Which begs the obvious question, doesn’t it.”

  “Absolutely,” Ellen said. “If you weren’t behind what happened to McGavin and Logan, who the fuck was?”

  “You know exactly who, Special Agent,” Strang said. “The ‘how’ is another matter, but we at the Agency have no doubt that Carl Mandeville orchestrated both murders.”

  “Our sources tell us that you were the ‘how,’ if not personally, then the person who arranged for some operatives from beyond the Chinese wall to come take a hand in saving the DMX,” Ellen protested.

  “Your sources?” Strang said. “Your sources were told what we wanted them to hear, Special Agent. You’re missing the big picture here.”

  “Me, too,” Av said. “So—”

  “It’s pretty simple, Detective. Before there was a DMX, the only agency that was allowed to go places and kill ‘persons of interest’ was the Agency. Then, because of all the so-called intelligence failures preceding nine-eleven, the DMX was created. The Agency became just one player among many. It was a signal demotion, both of federal trust, prestige, not to mention budgetary power.”

  “Wait,” Av said. “Are you saying—”

  “Exactly, Detective. The Agency was and is in total agreement with the senators who want to kill off the DMX. Not because of some arcane ethical concerns, of course, but for the reason that we want that particular mission back in our hands, where it rightly belongs. Once we found out Mandeville was planning to off the entire committee, to purify it, as he said a couple times, then we saw our chance.”

  “Now you sound like Mandeville,” Ellen said.

  Strang smiled. “Mandeville was told that I could be ‘useful’ to him, with the idea being that I could watch for an opportunity to unseat him. They gave him my classified bio, and then told him that I’d be hidden in plain sight in the Hoover building. He couldn’t resist the irony of that, apparently. They told him I could get things done for him, outside of the usual CT channels. But: Carl Mandeville’s not a trusting soul, as you can imagine. So he kept some of his own assets to himself, as you found out, Detective.”

  “So Hiram gave him the magic potions?” Av asked.

  “You’ll have to take that up with Mister Walker,” Strang said. “What I do know is he told me no.”

  There was a minute’s silence in the room as they digested these revelations.

  “Mandeville’s genius,” Strang said, “is that he saw how cluttered the CT world was becoming, with every Tom, Dick, and Harry agency in the government wanting in on the coolest intel action in town—the Kill List. If anybody tumbled to some of the shit he was doing, he could immediately implicate about a dozen different agencies, and then they’d all go after each other.”

  “You said he was gonna take out the entire committee?” Av said.

  Strang hesitated, as if trying to figure out how much more he should reveal. “He had a connection
at Fort Detrick, the army’s bioweapons defense lab. The CO of that facility called the Agency and asked if they knew why Mandeville was asking for some truly bad shit that could be used to kill instead of warn.”

  “A biological weapon?” Av asked. “We do that shit these days?”

  “No, we don’t. But Mandeville had set up a lab within the lab. He covered it by reprogramming a few million into the USAMRIID budget. DMX business. Secret-cubed. The guy was the original loose cannon.”

  “But now he’s in custody,” Ellen said.

  “For the moment, perhaps,” Strang said. “I don’t know where you’re taking him, but I’ll give you one piece of advice: do not, under any circumstances, allow him to communicate with anyone, anyone at all, because if he does, you’ll never get your hands on him again, and you and all your bosses will be wading through a shitstorm for the next year.”

  “We have him red-handed,” Ellen said. “He was about to shoot the detective here.”

  “No, you don’t,” Strang said. “For starters, I’m willing to bet you had no federal warrant to even be there at that park. The only help you could muster up were these rather—interesting specimens, from the MPD, for God’s sake.”

  “Hey,” Wong growled. “You want to see interesting? I’ll show you interesting.”

  Strang rolled his eyes. “You guys did all this on the fly, didn’t you, Special Agent. Let me tell you how this will end: my director will come to see your director. I am confident that they will work something out.”

  “We could subpoena you, then,” Ellen said. “You seem to know so much.”

  Strang laughed a short bark of a laugh. “I keep forgetting—you work for the Bureau. It’s all about the airtight case, isn’t it? When Mandeville went from éminence grise to personally pointing a gun at a cop? He stepped out of the civilized light and into the same world he thought he owned—the world of ruby-eyed robots coming for you in the night. Besides, I’m going to be—unavailable, for a while.”

  “Aw, lemme guess,” Av asked. “In one of those undisclosed locations, right?”