“Why would he do that?”
“Because we now had video of him suborning the director of the CIA to commit treason. If we ever made that public here in the US, the entire Chiang faction, having embarrassed the Central Committee once again, would be crushed once and for all.”
“But if you did make that public, wouldn’t that take care of Hingham for you?” Melanie asked.
“They were doing what Hingham often did, couching their discussion in academic terms, with lots of BS about the inevitable currents of history and the manifest destiny of such a great nation as China. Even if we released the video, we’d have had to dress it up with a lot of analysis, which meant it wasn’t iron-tight. Plus, there was no guarantee that this administration would have let us even do it.”
“Not to mention that it might have made the both of you look like fools,” Allender pointed out. “For ‘allowing’ an MSS sleeper to live in the director’s office.”
“Ahem,” Wallace said.
“So what happened? He agreed?”
“He did. But that still left us with the problem of Hingham. All we had was talk. We needed to force him to make a move. To do something.”
“And there we were.”
“Yes, precisely,” McGill said. “There you were. The original loose ends.”
“And all the smoke and mirrors about Hank being dead or Hank being in a coma—that was to induce me to play Sherlock?”
They both looked at him and smiled. “Hingham panicked when we had Lansing picked up,” Wallace continued, “He’d figured out you guys were suspicious of Lansing, so he had to do something to take you and Ms. Sloan off the boards. And that was our objective all along: not to light up what Hingham thought, or agreed with, or predicted, but to catch him doing something—like trying to capture you and Ms. Singer, here, in the bowels of the city.”
“And the Secret Service?”
“That’s the Agency from which I came to Langley, remember?” Wallace said. “I couldn’t use Agency assets, of course, or Hingham would know.”
“And why use me to interrogate Lansing?”
“Why not? You’re probably the best interrogator in the business, plus once you broke Lansing and told me, you would realize that somebody pretty high up in the Agency—Carson, here, or possibly even Hingham—would be after you. When you discovered that your protection had been withdrawn earlier tonight, you bolted. Chiang the brother had eyes on you. He got word to Hingham, who consented to a grab team of MSS operatives. Now, why he decided to personally come to the scene is puzzling.”
“Because Melanie took out the first team they sent after us,” Allender said. He described the fight and how Melanie had pretty much single-handedly taken the entire Chinese team on and won.
“Bravo,” McGill said. “We didn’t know that.”
“By the way,” Allender said. “We ran into something really strange down there. A track that switched off the main line and went into a heavily guarded tunnel. The guards there threatened to shoot us both unless we got out of there.”
“Ah,” McGill said. “You ran into the White House stub. That’s a piece of track that leads from under the White House Situation Room to the main-line system. In the event of a nuclear emergency, they can hustle the president down to the stub, where there’s a train always waiting. They can take over traffic control of the entire Metro system from there and divert every train in the system, and then get the president out of the city to one of several secret helicopter launch sites at eighty miles an hour, underground. I’m a little surprised they didn’t just shoot you right off the bat.”
“Well, I can explain that, Carson,” Wallace said. “Those were Secret Service protective-detail guards. Once you ran for the Metro, I’d briefed them to look for you, and run you off if, in fact, you showed up. We couldn’t know where you’d end up, but because the entire Metro system is part of the National Emergency Action network, there are Secret Service people throughout the network. I was just covering all the bases.”
McGill looked over at Wallace. “Listen to you,” he said. “You’d think you’d been a spook yourself.”
“Well,” Wallace said. “Sometimes I get it right.” He looked at his watch and yawned. “Enough fun for one night, I think. Doctor Allender, your Agency thanks you for a job well done. For what it’s worth, I’m going to take a shot at the director’s job, and if that happens, Carson, here, will move up to Deppity Dawg. We’ll need a new DDO. Interested?”
Allender laughed out loud. “Absolutely not,” he said. “But you might think about letting me have a séance with Hingham down in the Dungeons.”
“Why?” McGill asked sharply.
“Because you’re both assuming that Hingham was just a naïve puppet in the MSS chess game. What if he wasn’t? What if Lansing wasn’t the only dragon seed? Hell, what if goddamned Hingham was a dragon seed?”
McGill’s eyebrows shot up at that unlikely thought. He looked over at Wallace as the two of them got up to leave. “Okay,” Wallace said. “I think maybe we should do that. I may even want to watch. We’ll be in touch.”
Allender got up, too. “One last question for Carson: When you originally called me out of retirement to help with the Wallace mystery, you said that Hank had been running a swan.”
McGill started to smile, but didn’t say anything.
“You said that you could brief me into whatever you did know about the bogus mysterious death, except for the identity of the swan. So: Who the hell was the swan?”
“Why, Preston, my dear fellow,” McGill said, with a big grin now. “That would be you, of course.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Allender sat down and finished his Scotch, while Melanie looked at him with an amused expression on her face. “You have really interesting friends,” she said finally.
He just shook his head. “I guess if you’re going to be a chess piece it’s good to have Hank Wallace as your player. Damn!”
“Is the Agency ever going to reveal any of this?”
“Are you kidding?”
“What about Greer? How will they keep her quiet?”
“They’ll tell her that Hingham was removed for sanctioning a political smear on a sitting congressman and that the top brass at the Agency had to lie to her in order to get enough evidence to remove him. And, by the way—would she like to hold a public hearing on the matter, a year before the election? No? We thought not. We’re so sorry for any inconvenience. Even sorrier about your friend.”
“I’m not sure she’s gonna let it go that easily,” she said.
“Her question to us when we told her that nothing she’d heard so far was true was very telling, in my opinion—‘how does this affect me’? Her own reelection was a whole lot more important than any national-security issues.”
“She should be prosecuted for allowing MSS to get close to her,” Melanie pointed out.
“Probably won’t be,” he said. “The Agency has some pretty good leverage on her right now, just as she has some on the Agency. That might lead to a much better relationship.”
“You’re getting pretty cynical in your old age,” she said.
“‘Old age’ being the operative term, secret agent,” he said. “Now I need a hot shower and then some sleep.”
“Me, too,” she said, and then gave him an extremely direct look. Tired as he was, that look did not escape his notice. “Melanie,” he began, but she interrupted.
“It’s ‘Melanie’ now and forever, especially since you called me ‘Melanie’ in front of Chiang version two. And why not? You know I like you.”
“I’m too old and I’m too weird,” he said. “Ask anybody.”
She gave him an arch look that said this discussion wasn’t over. He fled upstairs. Standing in the hot shower, he resisted the urge to kick himself. Why not, indeed. He’d hidden behind his amber eyes for almost his entire lifetime, and now here was a woman who didn’t really care about that or the fact that he was much older than she w
as.
He came out of the bathroom dressed in a bathrobe and rubbing a towel through his hair. Then he stopped. All the lights were off. The only light in the room came from the bathroom door. Melanie was in his bed, her own head wrapped in a towel. She was grinning at him. He stared at her for a moment and then walked over to the bed. He was astounded to find that he didn’t quite know what to do next. She solved it for him.
“Disrobe,” she growled in a positively awful rendition of his own voice.
ALSO BY P. T. DEUTERMANN
THE CAM RICHTER NOVELS
The Cat Dancers
Spider Mountain
The Moonpool
Nightwalkers
THRILLERS
Cold Frame
The Last Man
The Firefly
Darkside
Hunting Season
Train Man
Zero Option
Sweepers
Official Privilege
SEA STORIES
The Commodore
Sentinels of Fire
Ghosts of Bungo Suido
Pacific Glory
The Edge of Honor
Scorpion in the Sea
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
P. T. DEUTERMANN is the author of several previous novels, including Pacific Glory, Ghosts of Bungo Suido, Sentinels of Fire, and The Commodore. Deutermann spent twenty-six years in military and government service, including as a captain in the Navy and in the Joint Chiefs of Staff as an arms-control specialist. He lives with his wife in North Carolina. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Part I: The Black Swan
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Part II: The Red Swan
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Also by P. T. Deutermann
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
RED SWAN. Copyright © 2017 by P. T. Deutermann. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Young Jin Lim
Cover photographs: CIA Seal © Mark Wilson/Getty Images; feather © Leva Vincet/Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-11408-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-11409-9 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250114099
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First Edition: August 2017
Red Swan Page 27