The Ambler Warning

by Robert Ludlum

  “You’re good to go,” the burly industrialist said. “Welcome to my humble little shop. You might not think it’s my speed, but if you were a fashionista you’d be damned impressed. There isn’t a single price tag in this place that doesn’t have a comma.”

  “Get a lot of customers?”

  “Nary a one,” Fenton said, his cheeks broadening in a moisturized smile. “We’re almost never open. And when we are, I’ve got the world’s scariest shopgirl—Brigitte’s her name—and she specializes in making people feel like they’ve got shit on their shoes. She’s out to lunch at the moment, and I’m sorry you won’t get to meet her. Because she’s something, Brigitte is. She doesn’t exactly tell folks that they’re not worthy to be shopping here, but they get the message.”

  “I get the picture. If you’re trying to set up a safe house, I guess it’s more discreet than a big sign saying KEEP OUT! And let me guess—the door tower isn’t really for inventory control. It’s bug repellent.”

  “Total wide spectrum. Real powerful. We test it all the time—never been able to sneak a listening device through it. More pleasant than having to strip people naked and do a cavity search. More effective, too. Not that it would even matter if they did. Go check out the window glass.”

  Ambler walked over to the storefront glass; peering closely, he made out a fine-mesh metal screen within the glazing. It looked ornamental; it was in fact functional. “This whole place is a screen room,” he marveled. A screen room was a space enclosed by a grounded ferromagnetic mesh or gauze; the shielding blocked the transmission of any radiofrequency signals.

  “You got it. See that shiny back wall? Twelve layers of lacquer—twelve—with each layer polished before the next layer is applied, all done by real artisans. And underneath those twelve layers? Plaster and metal gauze.”

  “You’re a careful man.”

  “Which is why we’re meeting face-to-face. You talk to someone on the phone, you can never know whether you’re just talking to him, or to him and his tape recorder, or to him and whoever might have a digital intercept. I’m a big believer in compartmentalization, see. Do whatever I can to keep the information partitions in place, like the trays of a TV dinner.” The mogul chuckled contentedly. It was important to him that Ambler be impressed with his precautions.

  Keep him on the defensive. “In that case, how do you explain what happened to Osiris?” Anger flared in Ambler’s voice.

  Fenton’s ruddy face paled a little. “I guess I was hoping we wouldn’t focus on that.” Ambler saw a salesman put off his stride—but what was he selling? “Listen, what happened to Osiris was a goddamn tragedy. I’ve got a crack team looking into it, and though we don’t have answers yet, we’ll have them soon. The man was a prodigy, one of the most remarkable operatives I’ve had the privilege of knowing.”

  “Save your eulogies for the funeral,” Ambler sneered.

  “And he was a big-time admirer of yours—you should know that. Soon as it went on the squawk that Tarquin was out and about, Osiris was the first one who said I needed to reach out and bring you in. He knew that where I’m concerned, ‘on the loose’ just means ‘on the market.’ ”

  Ariadne’s thread—find out where it leads.

  “You seem to know a lot about me,” Ambler said, the comment a prod. Exactly what did Paul Fenton know?

  “Everything and nothing, it seems. Tarquin’s the only name anybody has for you. You’re exactly six feet tall, plus whatever your shoe heels add. Weight a hundred and ninety pounds. Age forty. Brown hair, blue eyes.” He smiled. “But those are just facts. Data. Neither you nor I is likely to be overimpressed with data.”

  Keep him talking. Ambler thought about the long afternoons he used to spend fishing—the alternating rhythms of letting out the line and reeling it in, tiring the big fish by letting it swim against the drag. “You’re too modest.” Ambler prodded further. “I think you know a lot more than you’re saying.”

  “I’ve heard tales from the field, all right.”

  “From Osiris.”

  “Others, too. I got a lot of contacts. You’ll learn that about me. Not many people I don’t know—among people who count, I mean.” Fenton paused. “Obviously you had some powerful enemies—and some powerful friends. I’d like to be one of them.” Fenton grinned again, shaking his head. “You impress the hell out of me, and not a lot of people do. In my book, you’re a goddamn wizard. A magician. Poof—the elephant vanishes from the stage. Poof—the magician’s gone, cape and wand and everything. How the hell did you manage that?”

  Ambler sat down on a brushed-steel stool, studying the industrialist’s smooth, ruddy face. Are you my enemy? Or will you lead me to my enemy? “How do you mean?” Ambler kept his voice low-key, bored.

  “Professional secret, huh? They told me that Tarquin was a man of many gifts, but I had no idea. Incognito ergo sum, huh? You realize we ran your prints?”

  Ambler flashed on the water tumbler that Osiris had given him in the back of the Bentley.

  “And?”

  “And nothing. Nada. Bubkes. Zip. You got yourself deleted from every single database in existence. We ran the standard biometrics—all the usual digital identifiers—and nothing comes up.” He broke off, started reciting: “ ‘As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn’t there. . . .’ ”

  “He wasn’t there again today,” Ambler put in.

  “I wish, I wish he’d come to play!” The ginger-haired man grinned as he misquoted the old nursery rhyme. “It won’t surprise you to learn that we’ve got access to all the State Department personnel files. Remember Horus?”

  Ambler nodded. Horus was a giant of a man who worked out too much—his arms dangled away from his torso when he walked, ape-like, and his acne-dappled back indicated steroid abuse—but he could be useful for rough stuff in less-than-finely-tuned Stab operations. Ambler had worked with him three or four times. They were not friends, but they got along fine.

  “Know his real name?”

  “Of course not. Those were the rules. We never bent them.”

  “I do. Harold Neiderman. Wrestling champ at his high school in South Bend. Did a stint with a SOLIC unit”—special-operations, light-intensity combat—“got married, got a business degree at a two-year school in Florida, got divorced, reenlisted . . . but the details don’t matter. Point is, I can go on about Harold Neiderman. Remember Triton?”

  Coppery hair, freckles, oddly narrow wrists and ankles, yet remarkably dexterous at silent kills: he was superb at garroting sentries, slicing throats—the kind of measures resorted to where even a silenced firearm would have been too noisy. Ambler nodded.

  “Triton would be Ferrell W. Simmons, the W. standing for Wyeth. Army brat, spent most of his early years in Wiesbaden, and most of his teens at the Lawton public high school, near Fort Sill, Oklahoma. This personnel info is all deep-down hidden stuff, by the way, not what you’d get from a casual trawl. But I’ve got insider privileges. I guess that’s clear enough. So it should be easy for me to get the four-one-one on Tarquin, right? But I got nada. Because you’re a magician.” The tone of wonderment in his voice was genuine. “Which, of course, makes you all the more valuable as an operative. If you’re captured—not that you would be, but if it happened—you’d be nothing more than a cipher. A smoke ring. A floater in your eye. Blink and it’s gone. Voilà—the Man Who Wasn’t There. Absolutely nothing would connect you to anyone else. Genius!”

  Ambler paused; he would not disabuse Fenton. Fenton himself was no small game. I got a lot of contacts: an understatement if anything.

  “Of course, a good magician can make things reappear, too,” Ambler said carefully. He turned and peered outside: shoppers tramping past, soundlessly, unseeing. He could use Fenton—but had others used him, too? If members of the retrieval team had somehow learned of the meeting . . . but so far there was no sign of it.

  “And you have—you’re here, aren’t you? But do you have any idea what you’re worth to me? Ac
cording to your former colleagues, you’re the closest thing they’ve ever met to a mind reader. And you officially don’t exist!”

  “So that’s why I feel so empty inside,” said Ambler dryly.

  “I’m all about getting the best,” Fenton said. “I don’t know just what you did to get yourself in trouble. Don’t know what kind of jam you were in. Don’t much care, either.”

  “I find that hard to believe.” Yet Ambler did believe it.

  “You see, Tarquin, I like to surround myself with people who are truly, truly excellent at whatever they do. And you, my friend, are off the charts. I don’t know how you managed to do what you did, but you are a man after my own heart.”

  “You think I’m a rule breaker.”

  “I know you are. Greatness consists in knowing when to break the rules. And knowing how.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been putting together the Dirty Dozen.”

  “We’re bigger than that. You’ve heard of the Strategic Services Group?”

  Ambler nodded. Ariadne’s thread—find where it leads. Alongside McKinsey, Bain, KPMG, Accenture, and dozens of others, it was one of those management-consulting firms that seemed to offer spurious solutions to spurious problems. He could remember the occasional billboard stationed in the major airports. The initials were big: SSG, the words Strategic Services Group much smaller beneath them. Emblazoned over a scene of perplexed-looking business executives was the slogan IT’S NO USE HAVING THE RIGHT ANSWERS IF YOU AREN’T ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS.

  “Glad to hear it, because I’m thinking it’s your future.”

  “I’m not exactly the MBA type.”

  “I’m not going to beat around the bush with you. Here we are, in a specially soundproofed space, privacy guaranteed by Faraday shielding and wide-frequency RF intercepts. Could not be more private if we were on the moon.”

  “And the atmosphere’s better.”

  Fenton nodded impatiently. “SSG is kind of like this place. It provides one kind of service publicly, but that isn’t why it exists. Maybe Osiris started to explain. See, what I am is the showrunner. That’s what they call me.”

  “Then what’s the show?”

  “An international management-consulting firm—what’s that, really? A bunch of people in suits and ties who travel all around the world, racking up the frequent-flier miles. Every major airport in the world is flooded with these guys. Any customs or border control official can recognize a business consultant a mile away: they’re pros, look like people who have learned how to live on airplanes. But you know how the ads talk about the ‘SSG difference’?”

  “ ‘Asking the right questions, not just providing the right answers,’ ” Ambler recited the advertising slogan.

  “The real difference, though, is that our core team is actually composed of former covert operatives. And not the bottom-of-the-barrel types, either. I’ve been creaming off the best. I’ve hired the Stab boys en masse.”

  “So it’s like a retirement perk?” The provocation was deliberate.

  “They’re not retired, Tarquin,” the ginger-haired man replied. “They’re doing what they used to do. Better. Difference is, now they’re free to do their jobs—their real jobs.”

  “Which is working for you.”

  “Which is working for freedom. For truth, justice, and the goddamn American way.”

  “Just checking,” Ambler interjected.

  “But really working. Not filling out paperwork in triplicate and falling on their sword every time they stub the toe of a goddamn foreign national—the way the Washington bureaucrats would have it. When things need to get rough, they get rough. No apologies required. You got a problem with that?”

  “Why would I?” Let the line out.

  “I never met an operative who did,” Fenton said. “My point is, I’m a true-blue patriot. But what’s always driven me crazy is the way we’ve let ourselves get shackled by regulation and federal oversight and UN accords and international treaties and what have you. The cautiousness, the timidity, of U.S. covert ops is obscene. A form of treason, almost. Our people are the best in the business—then the bureaucrats put leg irons on them! My thing is, I’m taking those leg irons off; now let’s see what you can do.”

  Reel it in. “Which should make you an enemy of the very government you’re trying to protect.” Ambler’s words were pointed, his voice level.

  “You asking whether I’m stepping on government toes?” Fenton raised his eyebrows, his weathered forehead sporting four amazingly regular creases, as straight as the creases on a boxed shirt just back from the laundry. “The answer is yes and no. Plenty of pencil-necks disapprove, no doubt about it. But there are good men and women in Washington, too. The people who really count, right?”

  “The people who count on you.”

  “You got it.” Fenton glanced at his watch. He had been worried about the time, had assured himself that he remained on schedule. But what schedule? “Listen, there’s a well-established model for this sort of relationship. I think you know how crucial private military firms—PMFs—have been over the past couple of decades.”

  “For auxiliary purposes, backup stuff, sure,” Ambler started.

  “Balls!” Fenton slapped the incongruously delicate table at the side of his chair. “Not sure how long you’ve been away, but it sounds like you haven’t kept up. Because it’s a brave new world out there. Things got global when Defense Service Limited—Brits, you know, mostly SAS—merged with Armor Holdings, which was an American company. They were guarding embassies, mines, and oil installations in southern Africa, doing Special Forces training in Indonesia, Jordan, the Philippines. Then it acquires Intersec and Falconstar. It acquires DSL, moves into risk-management services big-time, everything from mine clearance to intelligence. Then Armor buys the Russian firm Alpha.”

  Alpha, Ambler knew, was staffed by former members of an elite Soviet division, a Russian counterpart to the U.S. Delta Force. “The Spetsnaz of Spetsnaz,” Ambler said.

  Fenton nodded. “They buy Defense Systems Colombia, mostly ex–military people from South America. Pretty soon, they’re one of the fastest-growing companies around. Then you’ve got Group 4 Flack, a Danish corporation, which owns Wackenhut. You’ve got Levdan and Vinnell. And, in the L-3 Communications group, you’ve got MPRI, which gave me my original inspiration. Military Professional Resources, Incorporated—just that one firm, based in Virginia—is what kept peace and stability in Bosnia. You think the blue-helmets were doing it? Nope, it was MPRI. One day the Department of Defense’s Special Advisor to the Bosnian–Croat Federation retires. Next day he’s working the Balkans again—but for MPRI. It’s 1995, and all of a sudden the Croats are kicking Serbian butt up and down the block. How’s that happen? How did this ragtag bunch of incompetents suddenly learn how to execute a textbook-perfect series of assaults against Serbian troop positions? Can you spell MPRI? That’s what drove the Serbs to the bargaining table, as much as the NATO air raids. It isn’t just about privatizing the war, it’s about privatizing the peace. Men of the private sector working for the public good.”

  “I think we used to call ’em ‘mercenaries.’ ”

  “So what’s new? Hell, when Ramses II was fighting the Hittites, he brought in special military advisors from the Numidians. Or what about Xenophon’s Ten Thousand? Basically, a bunch of retired Greek warriors who hired themselves out to kick Persian ass. Even the Peloponnesian War involved a lot of subcontracting to the Phoenicians.”

  “You’re telling me it was outsourced?”

  “You’ll forgive an old war buff for going on about these things. But how can you believe in the genius of the marketplace and the importance of security without wanting to put the two things together?”

  Ambler shrugged. “I get the demand. What about the supply?” Again, his eyes swept along the terrazzo walkway outside the boutique, then back to the industrialist in front of him. Why was Fenton looking so intently at his watch?

  “Ev
er wonder what happened to the ‘peace deficit’? The American military has a third as many soldiers as it had during the height of the Cold War. We’re talking about vast demobilization. Elsewhere, too—South Africa, Britain, especially. Whole regiments got cashiered out. What’s left? The UN? The UN’s a joke. It’s like the medieval pope: lots of papal writs, not a whole lot of bayonets.”

  “So we get an army of exes.”

  “It’s more complicated than that, boyo. I’m not in the military sector anymore—that marketplace got too crowded for my taste. Paul Fenton likes to feel he’s making a unique contribution.”

  “And you’re doing that now?”

  “Well sure. Because SSG isn’t competing with the PMFs. They do overt. We do covert. That’s the beauty part, see? Ops, not combat. What we’re up to is something even more important. We’re about covert operations. Think of us as Consular Operations, Incorporated.”

  “Spies for hire.”

  “We’re doing God’s work, Tarquin. We’re making the U.S. of A. as strong as she ought to be.”

  “So you are and aren’t part of the U.S. government.”

  “We can do what the U.S. can’t.” Fenton’s eyes sparkled. At first, those eyes seemed to be no particular color; peering more closely, Ambler noticed that one eye was gray and the other green. “Oh sure, plenty of bureaucrats in Fort Meade and Langley, not to mention Foggy Bottom, are happy to denounce me, like I say. But deep down they’re glad I do what I do.”

  “With some, I’d imagine, it’s not very deep down at all. You must have close ties with some pretty high-ranking officers.” High-ranking officers: including those who know what was done to me—and why.

  “Absolutely. Officers that actively enlist our services. It’s a matter of outsourcing covert ops to Strategic Services.”

  “All the flavor, none of the calories,” Ambler said, forcing down a gorge of revulsion. Zealots like Paul Fenton were all the more dangerous because they viewed themselves in a heroic light. Even as their lofty rhetoric could justify every kind of inhumanity, they quickly lost the ability to distinguish between self-interest and the Great Cause to which they devoted themselves. They suckled their corporate entities on public funds while sermonizing about the virtues of private enterprise. True believers like Fenton placed themselves above the laws of men, above justice itself—which made them a threat to the very security they prized.