Beware the Jabberwock (Post Cold War Thrillers)

by Chester D. Campbell

  After studying the solemn face for a moment, Quinn made a judgment that he was dealing with an Arab. "I don't recognize you," he said in fluent Arabic. It was one of six languages he spoke almost without flaw. "Where did you get my name?"

  The dark eyes widened at the unexpected sound of his native tongue. "I come from Sur. Tyre, you may call it, in the south of Lebanon. I deal in various goods between Lebanon and Israel. Also information. One I deal with is called Shadrach, the Fiery One."

  Quinn fixed the Arab with a sharp stare. "Describe him."

  The man shrugged. "Large, one hundred thirty kilos, maybe more. He has a scar here." He drew a finger in a quick slash across the left side of his face.

  Quinn nodded. The description fit. Shadrach had been a key Israeli informer in Lebanon at the time of the 1978 invasion. That was the last Quinn had seen of him. The souring of relations between the U.S. and Israel that followed the invasion put a crimp in CIA-Mossad cooperation, and he’d had only limited contacts with the Jewish homeland since.

  "I'm acquainted with the man called Shadrach. What's your name?"

  "Ahmed Ali Nassar," he said with a bow.

  "All right, Ahmed. Did Shadrach send you after me?" The scattering of fluffy clouds above had taken on a reddish hue with the deepening sunset. Quinn shifted his position to get a better view of Ahmed's face. He took advantage of the movement to let his eyes make a quick sweep of the hills beyond. He still saw nothing to alarm him.

  "Yes, go to Mersin, take the ferry to Girne, he said. Get word to Pachinko." Then, anticipating Quinn's next question, he added, "He doesn't ask for money. He says he owes you something in return."

  In return for what? Quinn quickly searched his memory but could think of no reason the Lebanese would feel obligated to him. He had only participated in a few meetings with Shadrach along with a Mossad officer. Maybe he took that as an indication that American money was backing the payments he received from the Israelis.

  "Tell me about Jabberwock," Quinn said.

  "Shadrach says the Mossad has something called Operation Jabberwock. They are directing it against their friends as well as their enemies. He says—"

  Quinn heard a distant muffled sound and a dull thud as Ahmed's voice choked off. His face twisted with a look half shock, half terror. At the same instant, his chest seemed to explode and he crumpled to the ground.

  Quinn threw himself to the beach, reaching for the gun in his pocket as he fell. He counted on the navy jacket to make him almost invisible in the near-darkness. He turned his face toward the rocks on the hill, attempting to judge the trajectory of the bullet that had struck Ahmed in the back. It must have been a high-powered rifle with a silencer. Possibly an infra red scope. Damn fool, he cursed himself. Going against your instincts.

  Then he heard a rasping attempt at speech and realized the man wasn't dead, though surely he couldn't last long. Quinn pushed with his elbows and knees to slither the few feet to Ahmed's side. The wounded Arab lay motionless, his head turned toward Quinn. His lips moved, but Quinn had to push an ear close to hear the halting words.

  "Mossad...double...cross..."

  That was all. No more sound came from what he now knew was a lifeless corpse.

  Suddenly, over the intermittent roar of the nearby surf, he heard the splat of two more bullets, both kicking up the gravel a few feet away.

  Quinn pushed himself to his feet. Crouching by instinct, he began to run back along the beach toward where he had left the car. For an instant, he had a flashback to a railroad yard in southern France a few months before D-Day in 1944. He had been running from German rifle fire then. And he had been more than forty years younger. Now he had to breathe in gulps with his mouth open, but he ran with the surge of adrenalin, covering the distance quicker than he would ever have thought possible. He thanked God there was no moon to pin-point him against the brown pebbles that lined the shore. And the surf undoubtedly covered the sound of his feet.

  He was not sure whether any additional shots had been directed at him, but he finally reached the car, chest pounding, jerked open the door, jammed the key into the ignition and spun the wheels as he raced for the road.

  FOOTHILLS OF THE SMOKIES

  Chapter 8

  A few days later, Cameron Quinn stopped his rental car at a rusty, battered mailbox. He almost missed it but the letters "BH" caught his eye. He knew he had found the right place. The mailbox post leaned at an angle, nearly covered with weeds. On the left side of the narrow country road, opposite the box, an iron gate opened onto a set of Jeep tracks that wound back into a heavily wooded area.

  He followed the rutted tracks and shortly came to a sudden jog to the right, where he faced a once-white old frame farmhouse with a narrow porch stretched across its front. Now a forlorn relic of another era, the house had been patched like a moth-eaten quilt, with newer boards nailed in a random pattern. A mud-spattered Jeep sat in a weathered wooden shed beside the house.

  Quinn parked in front and started toward the porch. As he did, the front door swung open and out stepped a long-haired man with a matching salt-and-pepper beard. Quinn stopped and stared.

  "Burke?"

  Burke Hill shook his head in disbelief. "Cam Quinn. What in God's name—?"

  "You old reprobate!" Quinn's voice boomed. "I'd hardly have recognized you. That beard. And look at you; you've finally learned to eat." He remembered how he used to call Burke skinny. That had changed.

  Burke bounded across the porch and grabbed the outstretched hand. He stared at the oversized waistline. "You damn sure haven't forgotten how, Cam. What the hell are you doing here? Still working for the Company? We don't have any Russkies around these parts. Or are you still interested in them?"

  Quinn remembered him as something of a chameleon. His speech had taken on the easy drawl of the mountain people. "I'm still on the payroll, let's say. I'd wondered for a long time if you were the Burke Hill whose pictures I kept seeing in the National Geographic and Smithsonian."

  "Yeah, they help keep me in film and fodder. That where you got my address?"

  "No. I got that from Le Conte Gallery. You'd never guess where I got the gallery name, though."

  Burke shook his head. "Where?"

  "From Kingsley Marshall."

  "The DCI?"

  "Right. He has a picture of yours on his office wall. A mink. Said he got it as a birthday present back in November. I guess I've been avoiding that office the past few months. Anyway, I looked at the photo and saw a little plaque under it that identified the photographer as Burke Hill. One thing led to another, and here I am."

  Burke's smile faded with the rumpling of his brow. "One thing led to another, huh? That sounds sort of ominous. Maybe we'd better go inside."

  His voice rambled on in the manner of a monk suddenly freed from his vows of silence. Quinn wondered if he might have begun to question this reclusive existence, like the first faint sign of the body's rejection of something foreign to its own makeup.

  "Sorry I got no Scotch,” Burke said. “I've got a little moonshine the neighbor boys gave me. Only trouble is it'd probably take the enamel right off your teeth."

  Quinn chuckled as he followed his old friend inside. "Thanks, but I'll pass on that. Actually, I'm attempting to stay off the hard stuff."

  The living room was plastered with a wall-size mosaic map of the mountains. There was a sofa, a chair and a TV, each draped with an item of clothing that appeared to have been stripped off while Burke walked through the house the night before. At one end, next to a window, stood a large oak rolltop desk and beside it a tall metal shelving unit. The shelves were packed with a well-thumbed collection of hardbacks and paperbacks.

  "Make yourself at home, Cam. I'll only be a minute." Burke headed for the small kitchen beyond, continuing the conversation as he went. "You on the wagon? That's hard to take."

  It had been more than twenty years since the two worked together.

  "To be honest, it wasn't easy. But it was s
omething I had to do." Quinn relaxed in the chair. It was good to be back with someone who had no axe to grind.

  "Had to?"

  "You remember my wife, Julia?"

  "Sure. She fixed dinner for me at your house a time or two. Real pretty lady."

  "Well, she died a little over a year ago. Cancer. I watched her gradually waste away. It was..." His voice cracked, and he swallowed hard. Just thinking of her lying there emaciated, her hair vanished, still hurt like a dagger in the heart. "On top of all the pressures at the Agency, it was just about more than I could take. I hit the bottle a bit too hard. Drew a six-month suspension and a sojourn on the dry-out farm. I don't guess I'd have made it except for Lori. She stood by me like a trouper."

  Burke brought in two tall glasses of a fruit punch concoction, handed one to Quinn and sat down across from him. "This'll make you so damned healthy you probably won't be able to stand it. Say, I'm awful sorry to hear about Julia. Your daughter, Lori, I remember as a cute, perky little kid with a pony tail."

  That brought an amused grin. "She's now a cute, perky big kid. How does middle thirties sound?"

  "Damn. It's been that long?"

  "She's a jewel. I had hoped she would make me a grandfather. She's got her mother's maternal instincts. But no such luck. She had a brief marriage, a real disaster. She's a confirmed bachelor girl now."

  "What about the suspension, Cam? You in good graces now?"

  Quinn took a sip of the drink and licked his lips. Not bad, but no real substitute for Scotch. "That's the sixty-four-dollar question," he said after a moment's hesitation.

  He was lucky they hadn't forcibly retired him. The CIA was definitely touchy about alcohol and drug problems after the celebrated flap over Edward Lee Howard, the over-imbibing Soviet desk man who was fired and then defected to the Russians. Fortunately for Quinn, he had a close friend in Senator Barley of Maine, senior Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Barley was an irascible old curmudgeon who had once been in his father's law firm, but he was a staunch supporter of the CIA. It was an open secret that Cam's immediate superior, Hawthorne "Hawk" Elliott, chief of the counterintelligence staff, would be happy to see him nailed to the wall. Elliott had been a critic of Israel and a detractor of James Angleton. When he had moved eventually into Angleton's old slot, he made no secret of his displeasure with those who had been close to the legendary CI chief.

  Hawk Elliott had finally found his opportunity and was ready to throw Quinn to the wolves when Senator Barley interceded. He prevailed on Marshall to give Quinn another chance. Although he had come from the analyst ranks, the DCI had strong feelings of loyalty to operations veterans who had devoted their lives to work in the shadows of international intrigue. Quinn had put his skin on the line in World War II and countless times over his nearly forty years with the CIA.

  His reprieve was only temporary, though. The senator had announced he would not run for reelection, and Quinn knew Elliott was lurking in the wings, just waiting for him to make a misstep.

  Chapter 9

  Burke Hill was no stranger to the internecine warfare among government agencies. Sipping on the fruit punch, he looked across at his friend. He had known Cameron Quinn as an exceptional case officer and a fiery competitor. They had crossed paths several times when he was assigned to what was known in the FBI, though not very widely, as J. Edgar Hoover's Goon Squad. They carried out black operations of questionable legality. Some of the assignments took place outside the U. S., often infringing on the CIA's territory. Back home the Agency had been busy returning the favor by often ignoring the FBI's sole jurisdiction stateside.

  The two agencies operated at arm's length in those days, as though they worked for separate governments. But after first linking up on a case in Mexico, Burke and Quinn teamed up on several operations in Europe. Unbeknownst to their superiors, of course.

  He could never remember Cam looking so down, so almost broken. If there was such a thing as the odor of defeat, it would have fouled the air around him. Burke gave him a warm grin, searching a way to pump a little life back into those somber eyes. "Remember the time we first met?"

  "Mexico City?"

  "Yeah. I was about to feed a guy named Jorge Velasquez a little potion the lab guys out at Dugway Proving Grounds had dreamed up."

  "One of my best Mexican agents," Quinn said with a chuckle. "He was a high ranking Party member."

  "Hoover had decided to teach him a lesson. He'd loused up an operation of ours down there. Then I met you at that bar on the Paseo de la Reforma. You told me you'd put the guy up to it in the first place to protect his cover with the CIA."

  Quinn leaned forward as though about to break up as that old bellowing laugh Burke remembered shook his sagging shoulders. "Damn, that was funny. You never told me what that stuff was you planned to give him."

  "I don't know what was in it. All I know is what happened to an agent who picked up some of it out at Dugway as a courier. He got curious, best we could figure, and opened the package. They found him wandering naked through a little town near Provo a couple of days later, babbling like the village idiot. Didn't know who he was or where he'd come from. The Bureau quickly put out word he'd had a breakdown and resigned."

  It required some fancy footwork to cover his rear end on the Mexico City operation, Burke recalled. Quinn persuaded his agent to lay low for a while, and they mounted a small disinformation campaign to convince Hoover that Burke had successfully put the Mexican out of commission.

  "I was lucky I ran into you then," Quinn said. He finished off his punch and toyed with the glass. "As I mentioned, I had gone to a meeting in the Director's office when I saw your name under that photograph. As the conversation developed, it hit me like a lightning flash that you were the man I was looking for."

  The meeting had taken place the past Monday, the day he returned from Cyprus. He had sent back a flash report through the Nicosia station, detailing the death of Ahmed Ali Nassar. It resulted in a hasty march to Marshall's seventh floor office in the company of Hawthorne Elliott and the Deputy Director for Operations, General Frederick Palmer. The Director had initiated the Jabberwock investigation a week earlier when he gave the DDO two telephone intercepts that were passed along by the National Security Agency. Some alert analyst at NSA's labyrinthine headquarters at Fort George Meade, Maryland, spotted the apparent codeword Jabberwock in two unrelated international telephone intercepts picked up three days apart. The head of his branch, a former CIA man, decided it was something the Agency might want to delve into.

  After Quinn gave a firsthand account of the events on the beach at Cyprus, Kingsley Marshall turned to his deputy and the CI chief. "What do you make of it, gentlemen?"

  General Palmer had only recently been named Deputy Director for Operations. Prior to that he was an intelligence staff man at the Pentagon with excellent connections on The Hill. Though well versed in military intelligence, geopolitics, national strategies, and the intricacies of top-level decision making, he had quickly learned the CIA's Clandestine Services was a whole different ball game. He deferred to his Counterintelligence chief.

  "It could very well be a new Israeli move to subvert us," said Elliott, frowning. He was a cool operator who had served in CIA stations around the globe, including a stint as Moscow station chief, before assuming his present post. He had earned a reputation for being the proverbial thorn in the KGB's side. But the nickname "Hawk" was related not to his anti-communism but to his prowess as a pinpoint-passing quarterback at Princeton. The CIA recruited him just out of college during the Korean War.

  "You think the Mossad would risk another Pollard affair?" General Palmer asked, referring to Jonathan Jay Pollard, a civilian intelligence analyst with the Naval Investigative Service arrested as an Israeli spy in 1985.

  Elliott swept the question aside with a perfunctory wave of his hand. "I think all they learned from that was to be a little more careful in the future."

  "They certainly know
Quinn," the DCI said. "I find it hard to believe they would deliberately shoot at a CIA officer, even in that part of the world."

  Elliott brushed a large hand across his cheek. "You never know who the kidon will target, but you’re right, it may not have been a Mossad termination. This guy Nassar was obviously Palestinian. He could have been a target of some group like Abu Nidal's. If he was connected with a renegade PLO faction, just making contact with us would have put him on the hit list."

  Marshall frowned darkly when his CI chief used the euphemism "termination." Although assassination was strictly forbidden in the CIA by executive order, he was still fearful some of the old hands had come up with ingenious alternative methods to accomplish the same ends. He turned his attention to Quinn. "What do you think, Cameron?"

  "I agree with you. I can't see the Mossad coming after me. That's not an easy place for them to operate anyway. This just doesn't strike me as an Israeli type of operation. If only I could have talked to Nassar a little longer. I haven't figured out yet what he was trying to tell me at the end.”

  "The Mossad is planning to double cross us,” Elliott said before Quinn hardly got the last word out. “That's what it says to me. I don't know why you can't see it. I'll admit I'm not all that damned worried about it, though."

  Marshall kept his eyes on Quinn. "Have you turned up anything from either end of those phone calls?"

  "Nothing useful. On the one from Singapore to Kansas City, it originated at a pay phone in a hotel on Orchard Road. The call went to the headquarters of Rush Communications, a company that deals in cellular phones, long distance reselling, television microwave systems and such. It went to the private line of a vice president. He was in Hawaii on business. The secretary doesn't remember anyone using his office that day. On the Berlin call, we received a similar denial of any knowledge. I haven't completed checking out the Hong Kong end. I'm hopeful of picking up a lead there. But with this Israeli angle cropping up, I could surely use some help."