“How soon?” Tsai repeated.
Chao glanced at his watch and allowed himself a tight smile. “What time do you have?”
NEW YORK
The Plaza Hotel, at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South, had been erected at the start of the twentieth century and was a mainstay of Manhattan elegance ever since. With its copper-edged cornices and gilt-and-brocade interiors, it suggested a grand French château on the corner of Central Park. Its Oak Room and Palm Court, along with its upscale galleries and boutiques, provided countless opportunities for people to help pay for its upkeep, even those who had not rented one of its eight hundred bedrooms.
But it was the hotel’s Olympic-sized swimming pool, on the fifteenth floor, where, at Osiris’s insistence, the two men continued their conversation.
Another clever rendezvous, Ambler judged, as the men disrobed and changed into Plaza-provided swim trunks. It would be hard to conceal a listening device under these conditions—and nearly impossible to make an audible recording over the ambient noise of splashing water.
“So who are you working for these days?” Ambler had prompted, treading water in the deep end beside Osiris. An elderly woman toward the shallow end was lazily swimming laps along the pool’s narrower dimension. Otherwise the pool was vacant. A few dowager types, dressed in one-piece swimsuits, were sipping coffee or tea as they reclined on poolside chaise lounges, doubtless summoning energy for some postponed exertion.
“They’re people like us is who they are,” Osiris replied. “Really, just organized differently.”
“I’m intrigued,” Ambler said. “But not enlightened. What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s really about unleashing talent. You’ve got all these former covert-ops people, lots of old Stab hands, in fact, who might not have been using their skills to full advantage. Now they’re still serving American interests, but they’re paid for and deployed by means of a private concern.” Osiris’s avoirdupois kept him buoyant; treading water cost him minimal effort.
“Private enterprise. An old story in this country. Old as the Hessian mercenaries who helped spice things up during the American Revolution.”
“A little different, maybe,” Osiris said, breathing easily. “We’re organized as a private-sector network of associates. Network’s the key idea.”
“More like Avon or Tupperware than Union Carbide, then. The multilevel marketing model.”
Following the sound of Ambler’s voice, Osiris repositioned his face slightly; his sightless eyes seemed almost to peer. “Not how I’d put it, but yes, that’s the general idea. Independent agents, working independently, but coordinated and deployed by their ‘upline.’ So you can understand why the team is so eager to have you aboard. They want you for the same reason they wanted me. I have a unique skill set. So do you. And these people are intent on bringing in unique talent. Puts you in a good bargaining position. You know, you’re something of a mythic figure among the Stab boys. The bosses figure if only half the stories they tell about you are true . . . and I’ve seen you work, so I know the score. I mean, Christ, what you did in Kuala Lumpur—now that’s the stuff of legend. And I was there, you’ll recall. Not a lot of Malay speakers in the Political Stabilization Unit.”
“That was a long time ago,” said Ambler, arching himself into a back float.
Kuala Lumpur. It had been many years since he thought about it, but the memories came back swiftly enough. A convention complex at the Putra World Center, in the city’s financial district, by the Golden Triangle Area and the Petronas Twin Towers. It was an international trade convention, and Tarquin was officially a representative of a New York law firm specializing in intellectual property: Henry Nyberg had been the field legend on that occasion. A member of one of the foreign delegations, Tarquin’s bosses had learned, was a terrorist plant—but which? Tarquin had been dispatched as a walking lie detector. They thought it might take him the full length of the four-day conference. Instead, it took him less than half an hour. He had strolled into the lobby of the convention center on the first morning, wandering around clusters of people, with their conference-provided blue binders, watched the marketing reps exchange cards, watched entrepreneurs stalk potential investors, and the thousand other dances conducted among business executives. The air in the lobby had been heavy with coffee and warm breakfast pastries. Tarquin allowed his mind to wander aimlessly as he circled the lobby, nodding, from time to time, as if to someone just past the sight line of anyone who was looking at him. Twenty-five minutes later, he knew.
It wasn’t one person but two, both of whom had attached themselves to a banking delegation from Dubai. How had he known? Tarquin did not bother to parse the subliminal signs of furtiveness and fear; he saw them, and he knew, the way he always did. That was all. An intel team from the Political Stabilization Unit spent the rest of the day confirming what he had detected at a glance. The two young men were nephews of the bank’s chairman; they had also been inducted into a jihadi brotherhood while studying at the University of Cairo. The brotherhood had instructed them to procure certain pieces of industrial equipment—hardware that, while harmless in itself, could, in combination with more commonplace materials, be used in the manufacture of munitions.
Ambler allowed himself to float peacefully in the water for a few long moments. These people know what you can do, he reflected. How will that change the equation?
“In Kuala Lumpur, everyone asked you how you knew, and you said it was obvious, that those guys were sweating bullets. But it wasn’t obvious, not to anyone else. And they weren’t sweating bullets. The Stab analysts reviewed the video later. The fact is, to everyone else, they were doing a damn impressive job of blending in. They looked bored and dutiful, exactly as they wanted to look. Only, you saw them differently.”
“I saw them the way they were.”
“Exactly. Something nobody else could. We never really talked about this. It’s an amazing skill. A gift.”
“Then I wish I could exchange it.”
“Why—is it too big for you?” Osiris chuckled. “So what’s the deal? Some witch doctor give you an amulet one day?”
“I’m not the best person to ask,” said Ambler soberly. “But I think it has to do with this: Most people see what they want to see. They simplify things, engage in hypothesis confirmation. I don’t. I can’t. It isn’t something I can turn on or off.”
“I don’t know whether that’s a blessing or a curse,” Osiris said. “Or a little of both. Comme d’habitude. The condition of knowing too much.”
“Right now my problem is knowing too little. You know what I’m after. Enlightenment.” Indeed, for him it was a matter of life or death. He needed to know the truth, or he would be dragged into an undertow of the unconscious from which he would never emerge.
“But enlightenment comes in steps,” Osiris said. “As I said, what I’ve really got to offer is judgment, rather than information. Tell me the relevant facts, and I may be able to help you make sense of them.”
Ambler looked at Osiris, who was still treading water almost effortlessly. Water beaded on his broad shoulders, but his fringe of red hair remained dry. The man’s blue sightless eyes were welcoming, even fond; what tension Ambler could detect was not the result of stratagem or deception. His misgivings were automatic, and he would have to set them aside. The opportunity, if it was real, could not be passed on.
The Chinese man in the well-tailored suit—a subtle glen-plaid pattern, in a superfine merino—attracted hardly any notice as he came through the revolving doors and into the front lobby of the Plaza Hotel, on Fifth. He was slight of build, handsome, with delicate features and bright, friendly eyes. He nodded at one of the clerks at the front counter, and she returned his nod, assuming that the man had confused her with whatever girl had checked him in. He nodded at the concierge, who flashed his if-I-can-be-of-service grin, and did not break stride as he made his way past the elevator bank. If he had looked uncertain, if he had sto
pped to orient himself, one of the underoccupied staffers might have stepped in with a May I help you, sir? But at an eight-hundred-room hotel, it was a safe bet that someone who looked like he belonged did indeed belong.
Within a few minutes, he had ascertained that his quarry was in none of the lobby or dining spaces of the hotel; within a few minutes more, he had determined that they were in none of the other public spaces of the lower levels—the art galleries, shops, styling salons, or spa.
Joe Li had already ruled out the possibility that the quarry had taken a hotel room here: an upscale establishment like this made an inconvenient number of demands—IDs, impressions taken of credit cards, and so forth. These did not look like people who wished to leave such a record of their visit. Their absence from the main public spaces left two other possibilities. One was the hotel fitness center.
None of the hotel’s many official greeters saw him turn down a carpeted corridor between two elevator banks and through a discreetly marked service entrance. They did not see him open his briefcase and assemble the pieces of equipment it had carried. They did not see him step into a janitor’s slate gray coveralls, which completely concealed his lightweight suit, and board a service elevator, accompanied now by a wheeled mop-and-bucket assembly.
If they had encountered him now, they would not have recognized him. Simply by muscular changes and postural adjustments, he had aged himself by twenty years; he was now a stooped man, tending to his bucket and an endless list of chores, the hovering custodial presence that few people really notice.
Osiris was beginning to sound a little breathless, and not because of any physical exertion. “Don’t you see?” he was saying. “There’s an alternate hypothesis.” He treaded water with small graceful movements, as if he were conducting a small chamber orchestra. The blue of his eyes matched the blue of the pool water.
“Consistent with my experiences over the past twenty-four hours?”
“Yes,” said his old colleague. “Your account has been admirably clear. You’ve been baffled by the fact that your memory of who you are doesn’t square with the world you inhabit, and you assume it’s the world that has been manipulated. What if that assumption is wrong? What if it’s your mind that has been manipulated?”
Ambler listened with a rising sense of dread as the big-bellied operative began to explain.
“It’s Occam’s razor: What’s the simplest explanation?” Osiris went on. “It’s easier to alter the contents of your head than it is to change the whole world.”
“What are you trying to tell me?” Ambler felt numb.
“You know about Bluebird, Artichoke, MKULTRA—all those behavioral-science programs from the fifties, right? They’ve been declassified, hashed over. Funny little episode in the history of the spy agencies is what people think.”
“And rightly so,” Ambler scoffed. “You’re naming Cold War follies, fantasies from a bygone era. Discontinued long ago.”
“Well, that’s the thing. The program names changed, but the research never was discontinued. And the history isn’t irrelevant. Really, it started with Josef Cardinal Mindszenty—name ring a bell?”
“Another midcentury victim of the Communist regimes, early in the postwar era. Hungary had a show trial, got him to confess on camera to charges of treason and corruption. But it was bogus.”
“Sure it was. But the CIA was curious. It had this audiovisual feed of him confessing, and it ran the feed through all these stress-test indicators and tried to find evidence that he was lying. And the strange thing was, they failed. All the tests said he was telling the stone truth. Yet the charges really were trumped up—they knew that, too. Which got them thinking. Could the prelate really have believed what he was testifying? If so, how had they convinced him of this . . . alternate reality? If he’d been drugged, what drugs were they using? And so forth. All of which kick-started our own mind-control experiments. For the first couple of decades, most of it was bullshit, all right. They’d put someone into a coma with Pentothal, then inject him with enough Dexedrine to make him bug-eyed. What would that do to someone—would it make them receptive to narcohypnotic suggestions? The best and the brightest became fascinated by the possibilities. Pretty soon, the Technical Services Staff was commandeered to the cause. But they needed even more resources, so they figured out a way to bring in the Army’s Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick in Maryland, where they had a biological research center.”
“How do you know so much about it?” asked Ambler. A shiver ran down his spine.
“Why do you think they put us together in the first place?” Osiris shrugged. “My background is in psyops. Like a lot of linguists. Language used to be a major sticking point for the mind benders. In the good old days, psyops would interrogate a Russian defector in a German safe house, or a North Korean in an apartment in Seoul, and they’d drug the guy up with some complicated protocol. Soon then these guys would have regressed, be blabbering away in the language of their home village, and these Berlitz monkeys at the agency would have no idea what was being said, and no ability to talk to them in their native dialect. That’s when they decided they needed people like me. They’d turn over a lot of rocks to find us and bring us in. So we’d pay our dues in one of the psyops projects. Then, by and by, we’d be loaned out to OGAs. ‘Collegiality,’ they called it. Actually, it was a matter of resource distribution, spreading the budget lines around.”
“OGAs—other governmental agencies. Like Consular Operations. Or its Political Stabilization Unit.”
“You know the routine. I finally asked for an official transfer to State because I thought it would be more stimulating on the language front. At Cons Ops, though, they were intrigued by the psych training I’d received. Back then, they still worried about you. Worried about how reliable you were. They liked the thought of my being around you on a couple of jobs.”
“So you were filing reports on me.”
“You got it. You’d be filing reports on the bad guy, I’d be filing reports on the good guy who was helping us get the bad guy. But you knew it at the time, I’ve no doubt. Business as usual, right?”
“I seem to recall that I was asked to file a report on you,” Ambler said. “They were still trying to grapple with the idea of a sightless operative. Wanted reassurance, again.”
Osiris smiled merrily. “Talk about the blind leading the blind. You must have known my brief, as I say. My sense was, you were too well mannered to call me on it.”
“I guess I knew you didn’t mean me any harm.”
“I didn’t,” Osiris said. “Actually, I’ve always liked you. Ever since Kuala Lumpur.”
“Really, that episode got way overblown.”
“Catching the jihadi puppies? Not what I’m talking about.”
“Then what?”
“Cast your mind back to just before that happened.”
“You were supposed to be working the door at the Putra World Center. Meaning you were sitting at the end of the bar, drinking some sort of apple fizz. Looked like beer. Had an earbud in an ear, so the tech could rotate microphone feeds from around the lobby. Idea was, if you heard something interesting or anomalous, you’d be able to signal me about it.”
“I never did, never had to. But what I’m talking about happened a little earlier. We were marching over there together, with our conference badges. And those Kilgour, French & Stanbury business suits that said ‘billable hours’ down to the very cuff buttons.”
Ambler grunted. “I’ll take your word for it.”
“These fingertips never lie. A very nice worsted, perfectly draped around the neck and shoulders.” Osiris lifted his hands and waggled his fingers. “So we’re on the sidewalk, not far from our destination, and this peasant from the provinces has been trying to get directions to the nearest train station, and nobody’s been giving him the time of day. From his accent, I can tell he’s a Dyak, you know, one of the fairly primitive ethnic minorities who live in villages scattered around wh
at’s left of rural Malaysia—and this is the heart of the financial district, mind you. People are busy, and nobody has time for a Dyak, so of course they ignore him, like he’s made of air. In desperation, this little guy—he’s probably in sandals and funny robes—turns to you for directions.”
“If you say so,” said Ambler.
“Now, you weren’t from there; you had no idea. But instead of telling the guy, ‘Sorry, can’t help you,’ you stop one of those fast-striding businessmen. Of course they’re happy to stop for a prosperous-looking Westerner like you. Then, with the little Dyak by your side, you say, ‘Can you tell us where the nearest train station is?’ and you stand there while the suit explains exactly how you get there. Meanwhile I’m cracking my knuckles in my trouser pockets, because we’ve got a big-deal piece of business ahead of us, and you’re taking the time to help some tribesman find his way home.”
“So?”
“It’s nothing that would stick in your mind, because it didn’t mean anything to you. It meant something to me, though. I had you figured as a major-league asshole like most of the Stab boys, and suddenly I’m thinking maybe you’re not.”
“Not even triple-A?”
“Strictly farm team.” Osiris laughed again. Ambler remembered that he was a big laugher. “It’s funny the things you remember. And funny the things you don’t. Which brings us to the next phase of the psych experiments. Vietnam is still going strong. Nixon hasn’t been to China yet. And what happens next is that a very brilliant, very dangerous, very powerful man finally gets on board.”
“You giving me a goddamn history lesson?”
“You know what they say. Those who forget the past—”
“Flunk their history exams,” Ambler said. “Big deal. Sometimes I think only those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
“I hear you. You’re talking about people who nourish grudges and grievances over shit that happened centuries ago. But what if I plant something nasty in your fruit patch—put some nightshade among your blueberries? Wouldn’t you want to know?”
The Ambler Warning Page 13