“So he said,” Allender said, unconsciously fingering his throat.
“I got a call from the Chinese embassy,” she continued. “Me: the unlisted Agency liaison officer working at the Hoover Building. Would I please come to lunch at the Old Ebbitt Grill. Yang Yi, himself, wanted to talk to me.”
“Wow,” he said. He wanted another cognac but decided to switch to water.
“Yeah, wow,” she said. “I called home, reported the request and asked for eyes, and then I went to lunch. He was businesslike and polite. Spoke pretty good English. Told me about Chiang Junior, and said that he was coming for Dragon Eyes, and, and this is the important bit, that they were pretty sure the son was already here in Washington.”
“What did you say?” Allender asked.
“‘Thank you’?” she said. “‘I appreciate the warning.’ Then he became somewhat reflective. For once, I had the sense to just shut up and listen. He asked if I thought the warning was worthy—that’s the word he used, ‘worthy’—of a return favor. I said yes.”
“What did he want?”
“Don’t know,” she said with a wry grin. “But I suspect I’ll find out one day.”
“You certainly will,” Allender said. “And I’m very grateful for your initiative. But why you? I would have thought that once you reported the meeting, McGill would have had Langley security people set up a perimeter here and wait for Chiang the younger.”
“That’s what I thought, too, but Mister Hingham, himself, told me to deal with it. He said that he would assign an expert to me who could handle whatever problem showed up. You saw him, and he lived up to his billing. So that’s what I did.”
That was almost unheard of, Allender thought. The director didn’t order operatives around. Even the DDO went through channels. So who was this woman? “I guess I have to ask: Who are you, really, and, more importantly, who’s your real daddy?”
“The director,” she admitted. “As I’ve been telling you. I work out of the director’s office. I’m one of a small handful of people Mister Hingham uses to work around the Agency bureaucracy when necessary. Or at least, that’s how he explained it to me.”
“Hingham said that?” Allender asked, incredulously. “That hardly squares with his reputation for being a total wuss. A director who goes through the motions, but never makes a decision, always has to ‘think about it’ whenever anyone presents a decision brief, and then delays until someone else finally frames a decision. Once the principal directorates figured him out, they pretty much gave up and went to McGill for direction on anything important.”
“I understand that’s his reputation,” she said. “But for all his purported weakness, I happen to think that his ‘China Will Rule’ hobbyhorse drives him a whole lot more than people realize. Think obsession.”
“Hingham of the Ivory Tower?”
“Have you spent a lot of time with him?” she asked. “He keeps the whole Agency at arm’s length for a reason, I think. Remember who appointed him, and how much he is aligned with the idea of a new world order, one in which the US doesn’t swing a whole lotta weight. The old hands automatically think he’s a weakling. I’m not so sure about that.”
“You don’t say,” Allender replied. “So tell me once more: You do not work for Carson McGill, correct?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Which means you probably don’t know.”
“Know what?” she asked, sounding just the least bit exasperated now.
“That Hank Wallace isn’t dead?”
To his immense satisfaction, her face went pale. “Are you shitting me?” she asked in a horrified voice.
“Not one pound, to quote our beloved DDO,” he said. “So maybe your close association with Mister Hingham in that fancy executive suite may not be as privileged as you think.” Then he pointed at the cognac decanter. “Help yourself.”
“Yes, please,” she gulped, but she had to wait for her cognac, because the chief technician came downstairs at that moment and asked her to come upstairs. When she returned she told Allender he’d need a new mattress and bed linens, but that the room was now forensically clear. She told him that she did open the windows, and that he’d need to give it a day or so. Maybe repaint.
Over cognac for her and water for him, they tried to figure out what to do. He revealed to her what McGill had told him and what Yang Yi had had to say to him, and that he thought it was maybe time for them both to go see the director. Rebecca wasn’t so sure. She pointed out that the two of them did not have any verifiable facts as to Mr. Wallace’s real situation. That wasn’t the best foundation for calling on Hingham to tell him that his DDO might be bent.
“Well then,” he asked. “Answer me this: How do we—you—deal with the Bureau? They think they’re working a possible homicide. Remember, too, that tissue samples are supposedly coming.”
Rebecca made a face at the mention of tissue samples. Allender understood, remembering what Commander Waring had told him. He told her about McGill’s comment that Wallace wouldn’t feel a thing. She groaned.
“What’s McGill’s motive?” Allender asked. “Personal advancement?”
“He’s certainly known to be ambitious, although he hides it pretty well under that faux British spymaster façade,” she said. “But, I think the Agency’s old-timers would agree.”
Allender got up and started to pace. Just like McGill, he reminded himself. He wasn’t entirely stable on his feet but needed to move around. He imagined he could still hear those booming gunshots. “Hank Wallace suffered a stroke,” he said. “McGill saw an opportunity. Hustled him off to Bethesda, put him in the presidential ward for secrecy, and then assumed Hank’s job, oh, so temporarily, of course. The director goes along with that because the decision has been made for him. McGill has probably been grooming some pet toads in the Directorate of Operations, so he proposes one of them become the new DDO. Hingham needs to think about that. If Hingham eventually agrees, then he controls the two most powerful positions in the day-to-day work of the Agency.”
“I shudder to think,” Rebecca said. “Oh, shit: What if Mister Wallace wakes up?”
“McGill told me that his prognosis was poor. Here’s the more interesting question: Is McGill capable of making that prognosis come true, if he has to? You know, go out there to visit the old man, wave a vial of some nasty vapor under his nose and flatline him? I’ve always thought McGill to be somewhat of a poser. You know, ‘M’ reincarnated at Langley sort of thing. The pipe, the Brit bullshit…”
“Let me tell you a story,” she said, eyeing the decanter. He poured her another draft. “When I came back from LA I was stashed in Hingham’s office while they figured out where I was going next. One day McGill came for a one-on-one meeting. I happened to be searching for a document in a file safe in the inner office. The director closed the door for their meeting, but they got into an argument and I could overhear them. State had sent a message that three Agency operators were about to be rolled up by some Afghan warlord. The nasties wanted to trade for someone we held in Gitmo. Hingham wanted to go ahead, but McGill was adamant. The three operators were NOCs and they’d known the risks. The director was horrified, from the sound of it. He asked McGill at one point what would happen to them. McGill said they’d probably be skinned alive, rolled in salt, and then be staked out in the sun to be eaten by scavengers.”
“Lovely,” Allender said. “But I forget myself: Islam is the religion of peace.”
“Well, then McGill gave the boss a lecture in the ‘hard realities of international espionage.’ Pointed out that the West had been killing Afghans of all persuasions ever since nine-eleven. Three nonoperational cover contractors against thousands of dead Afghans, he said. Think about that. Give them three grisly victories and they’ll become overconfident. Then we’ll kill thousands more.”
She paused to finish her cognac. “I’d not been around McGill much before this, but this was definitely not the caricature people talk about in the caf
eteria.”
“What did Hingham finally decide?” Allender asked.
“Don’t know,” she said. “I could tell they were wrapping it up and didn’t want to be spotted, so I left the office before he came out.”
Allender sat back down. “So the notion of going to Hingham and spilling the beans is—what? Pointless?”
She just looked at him.
“How about going to your titular boss at the FBI—the deputy director, correct?” he asked.
She nodded. “He’s a total straight arrow,” she said. “He’d tell the Bureau’s director and then the two of them would go to Main Justice immediately.” She hesitated. “I guess I’m trying to think of a way to keep this goat-grab in-house long enough to fix whatever’s going on, as opposed to having the Agency crushed under a tsunami of public outrage before anybody knows what McGill was—is—up to.”
He smiled. “Spoken like a loyal spook,” he said. “And I tend to agree. In fact, as you pointed out, neither you nor I knows that Hank is alive. I found out that McGill published the story at Langley that he’s getting medical treatment at Bethesda. He may have just been damned thorough in building that cover story, good enough to fool one of the senior pathologists out there. It’s not like I ‘habeas a corpus,’ as one of their pathologists put it. Truth be told, I’m thinking I need to go see for myself. You know, fool me once, shit on McGill. Fool me twice, shit on me for letting him.”
“You go out there, McGill will find out,” she said. “He said no more ‘sleuthing.’ Plus, McGill’s got Mister Wallace in the one place nobody from the Agency can access.”
He sighed and threw up his hands. “Okay,” he said. “Tomorrow. First thing. You and I will go see Martine Greer. She has the power to get us into that presidential clinic, or, if not us, someone from the Secret Service. We tell Martine what we think we know. If Hank is alive, even if he’s a gorp, then she can deal with the Bureau, and then they can go after McGill.”
Rebecca closed her eyes and appeared to think about it. She’s actually quite striking, Allender thought, observing her, but she’s hard. An edged weapon. Melanie was more attractive. Just as hard, perhaps, but more of a woman.
“All right,” she said. “I agree. But if there are any more incidents like this mess tonight, we’re going to need outside reinforcements. When McGill hears about this he’s not going to just sit still. He’s going to start asking the same questions we’ve been kicking around.”
“That’s why I want to fold the chairwoman into the picture. Think of it as insurance. For that matter, maybe we can obtain some ammo of our own, regarding Greer herself.”
“Jesus,” she muttered. “Why do I feel like I’m stepping into a snake den?”
“Because you are?” he said, and then felt a wave of fatigue sweeping over him. She saw it and stood up.
“You need to lie down,” she said. “Get some rest. Take a day off until that swelling goes down. Then we’ll go see Greer.”
“Sounds like a plan,” he said, turning to go back upstairs. He put his right foot onto the first stair and then she was right there, steadying him all the way up and then down the hall to the guest bedroom.
“Thanks,” he sad as he flopped down onto the bed. He tried to think of something clever to say but then began to drift off, but still conscious of the fact that she was standing right there and looking at him with something of a sympathetic expression on her face.
How the mighty have fallen, he thought.
NINETEEN
By seven thirty two mornings later, Allender and Rebecca Lansing were sitting on park benches near the Rayburn building, where Martine Greer had her offices. Being a committee chairman, she had two, one for her congressional district and a second one for the select committee. Allender pretended to read The Washington Post while inspecting every vehicle that came single-file down the ramp into the building’s protected underground parking area. Rebecca just sat there, enjoying a beautiful morning and sipping on a Starbucks, while she kept an eye out for the portly congresswoman in case she showed up at the building’s front entrance. Their plan was to see her go into the building and then try to catch up with her before the legislative day got under way and an appointment became impossible. If she came by car, their second objective was to see if she had anybody with her.
The day after the attack at his town house had been unpleasant. He’d still had a bad headache, accompanied by waves of nausea every time he tried to move around. The clean-scene people had found an iron throwing star embedded in the wall behind his headboard. He’d been lucky that it had hit him broadside and not with one of the deadly points. He’d stuck to water all day, staying off the booze in honor of that headache, and that had worked. By this morning he’d felt a lot better, and had celebrated by having some cognac with his morning coffee.
While he pretended to read, Allender called Commander Waring at the Bethesda forensics office and asked him to check on something. He told the doctor that there was a remote possibility of some kind of radiation poisoning associated with Mr. Wallace’s condition. He asked Waring to find out if the keepers of the presidential floors had checked for that, because, if it was true, they might want to move him so as not to contaminate such an important facility. Alarmed, Waring said he would do just that. Allender had spoken as if the fact that Wallace was indeed there had been firmly established, and he was pleased when Waring hadn’t questioned that.
At ten minutes until eight, Allender got lucky. When a 500-series Mercedes rumbled down the ramp, he spied Martine Greer’s large face behind the wheel. Even more interesting was the fleeting glance he caught of a striking Asian woman, probably Chinese, in the seat next to her. The ramp was stop-and-go because each vehicle’s driver had to insert a security card and get a look-see from an armed guard at the swing gate. As they passed, he called to Rebecca, “Let’s go.”
They hurried up to the main security lobby, showed credentials, CIA for him, FBI for her, and asked for an escort to Martine Greer’s office. A uniformed FPS officer took them upstairs. On the way, Dr. Waring called him back. No radiation, and yes, they had checked—SOP. Allender thanked him, and then they entered Greer’s office about one minute behind the congresswoman. Again they showed credentials, this time to a truly stunning blonde who gave Allender a momentarily peculiar look. He explained that they needed to speak to the congresswoman urgently before the morning routine got fully under way. Aides and staffers were hustling through the office, and Allender could see that the congresswoman’s visitors’ waiting room was already full. The young woman made a call, nodded, and then got up and took them back to Greer’s inner office.
“Make it quick, Doctor, we have a roll call in twenty minutes,” Greer said, standing behind her desk. Her AA was not there. She was inspecting a pile of point papers and folders even as she greeted them. She looked up and realized he wasn’t alone. “Who are you?” she asked.
Rebecca told her, and the congresswoman nodded in recognition. “Yes, now I remember that name,” she said. “So: Whatta ya got, Doc?”
“Hank Wallace is not dead,” he announced. “He is instead in a comatose state out in the presidential suite at Bethesda. Your dear friend, Carson McGill, has been lying to you. And me.”
Greer’s eyes widened as she lowered the papers. “Say that again?”
He did, and then she sat down, indicating for them to take chairs as well. Allender had expected her to ask him how he’d found this out, but instead she surprised him. “How does this affect me?” she asked. “Refresh my memory.”
Good question, Allender thought. “McGill told you that Wallace was dead with no apparent cause or manner of death. You then sicced the Bureau into whatever investigation was going on to find out why and how. Ms. Lansing here, who actually works out of the Agency director’s office as the ‘unlisted’ CIA liaison officer at Bureau headquarters, was assigned to lead the team doing that investigation. I was brought back from retirement to help with that effort from within
the Hoover Building.
“My instructions from McGill were pretty straightforward: muddle up the Bureau’s efforts in order to give the Agency time to figure out what had happened. At the moment, I’m pretty sure neither the FBI director nor the Agency director knows that Wallace is actually still alive. Everyone else at Langley, on the other hand, thinks Wallace is out there at Bethesda recovering from something. We’re here to get an answer to that famous Ghostbusters question.”
The congresswoman opened her mouth to ask what that was and then remembered. She then did what any boss who hasn’t a clue does: She asked Allender what did he recommend?
“I think you should call in the directors of the Bureau and the Agency and tell them what you’ve found out. Then have the FISA Court issue a warrant to arrest McGill and turn him over to a joint interrogation team to find out what the hell he’s up to.”
“What do you think he’s up to, Doctor?” she asked.
“If anything, I thought he was trying to do something that would knock the director off his perch and then take the top job, but I have to say, that doesn’t seem—what’s the word—sufficient?”
She nodded. Her phone rang. She picked it up and said, “Five Minutes.” Then she looked back at Allender. “Where does this put you guys?”
Allender looked at Rebecca and then back at Greer. “Way out there, in the cold and the dark.”
“Tell her,” Rebecca said.
“Tell me what?” Greer asked suspiciously.
Allender told her about the attack two nights ago at his home.
“Are you shitting me?” she cried out.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “Now, I was the brains behind what happened to his father. It’s just that—”
“Well, fuck yeah,” she said, almost shouting now. “There’s no way that could have happened without the Chinese embassy knowing that he was in the country!”
Red Swan Page 18