There, ten yards behind Fenton’s agent and mingling with a crowd of curious bystanders, was a face he wished he did not recognize. A Chinese face. A handsome, slightly built man.
The gunman at the Plaza Hotel.
SEVENTEEN
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The main building of the United States Department of State, 2201 C Street, was really two adjoining structures, one completed in 1939, the other in 1961—one, that is, at the advent of a world war, the other at the nadir of the Cold War. Every organization has a local history, an institutional memory that is cherished within its hallowed walls, if forgotten outside them. At the Department of State, there were auditoriums and meeting rooms for public events that bore the names of deceased dignitaries—there was, for example, the Loy Henderson Room, honoring a revered Director of Near Eastern and African Affairs from the forties; and a large hall named for John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State during the crucial years of the Cold War. Deep within the bowels of the newer building, however, were secure conference rooms that were not even dignified with names but known only by numeric and alphabetic designations. The most secure such conference room was designated 0002A, and a casual visitor to the basement might have assumed that it was given over to maintenance and janitorial equipment, like those to either side. The room was along a subterranean corridor of gray-painted cinder block, copper pipes, aluminum ductwork, and exposed fluorescent tubes. Meetings there were never “catered”; one did not go to any of the triple-zero rooms expecting pastries or cookies or sandwiches. The meetings were to be endured, not enjoyed, and anything that might prolong them was to be shunned.
Certainly the subject of this morning’s conference afforded no one any gratification.
Ethan Zackheim, the leader of the freshly assembled team, scanned the eight people at the table for signs of unspoken dissent. He was wary of “groupthink”—of the tendency of groups to fall into step, to agree on a unitary interpretation where the evidence itself was equivocal, open textured, ambiguous.
“Does everyone here feel confident of the appraisals we’ve been hearing so far?” he asked. Only noises of agreement were voiced.
“Abigail,” Zackheim said, turning to a large-boned woman in a high-collared blouse. “Are you confident of your read of the signals intelligence?”
She nodded, her brown bangs lacquered and immobile. “It’s confirmatory,” she cautioned, “not conclusive. But in combination with the other data streams, it raises the confidence level of the assessment.”
“What about your team at Imaging, Randall?” He turned to a slender, chalky-faced young man in a blue blazer, who sat at the table with his shoulders hunched.
“They’ve verified it twenty different ways,” Randall Denning, the imaging expert, replied. “It’s authentic. We’re seeing a subject whom Chandler’s people have identified as Tarquin, arriving at the Montréal Dorval just hours before the Sollinger assassination. We’ve confirmed the authenticity of the security video. We don’t see a significant margin of uncertainty here.” He slid the Montreal photographs to Zackheim, who looked them over, though fully aware that his unaided eyes would see nothing that had eluded the imaging experts with their computer-assisted methods of analysis.
“Likewise this picture, from the Luxembourg Gardens, about four hours ago,” the imaging expert went on.
“Pictures can be misleading, no?” Zackheim gave him a questioning look.
“It’s not just about the picture, it’s about our ability to interpret them, which has become immeasurably more sophisticated in recent years. Our computers can look at ‘thresholding,’ border analysis, saturation gradients of all kinds, and detect variances that even most experts would never notice.”
“Plain English, dammit!” Zackheim interjected.
Denning shrugged. “Consider that this one image is an enormously rich package of information. The twig patterns of a tree, the sap spills, the algae growth—all these things change day by day. A simple tree is never the same object two days in a row. Here you’ve got a complex field of objects, terrain with a very particular contour, patterns of shadows, which not only identify the time of day but also provide information about the configuration of thousands of discrete objects.” He tapped at the lower quadrant of the photograph with a black stylus. “Under magnification, we can see that there’s a bottle cap approximately three centimeters from the gravel path. An Orangina bottle cap. It wasn’t there the day before.”
Zackheim found himself drumming his fingers. “That seems a pretty slender reed—”
“Diurnal detritus is the trade jargon in my department for this sort of detail. It’s exactly what makes real-time archaeology possible.”
Zackheim fixed him with a hard stare. “We’re about to do something that’s as serious as a coronary, and every bit as irreversible. I need to be sure we have everything nailed down. Before Tarquin is declared ‘beyond salvage,’ we need to be sure we’re not heading off half-cocked.”
“Certainty is possible in high school arithmetic textbooks.” The speaker was a round-bellied man with a spherical head and heavy black-framed glasses. His name was Matthew Wexler, and he was a twenty-year veteran of the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He was a homely man with a slovenly appearance. He was also in possession of a formidable intellect, compared by one Secretary of State to a combine harvester: he had the uncanny ability to assimilate vast quantities of complex information and turn them into clear bullet-point distillations. He could translate data into action items, and he was not afraid to make a decision. In Washington, it was a quality of mind that was in scarce supply and great demand and valued accordingly. “Certainty does not exist in the real world of decision making. If we were to wait for complete certainty, action would be so delayed as to be irrelevant, and as the painful old saw reminds us, ‘Not to decide is to decide.’ One cannot decide with no information. But one can’t wait until one has complete information. There’s a gradient between the two termini, and procedural integrity consists in the ability to choose the right point of partial knowledge.”
Zackheim struggled to conceal his annoyance. Ever since someone had dubbed this credo the Wexler principle, the analyst missed no opportunity to recite it. “In your view, have we reached it?”
“In my view,” Wexler said, “we’re a safe distance beyond it.” He stretched his arms in a stifled yawn. “I’d also draw people’s attention to the question marks that hover over previous assignments of his. This is someone who must be stopped. Discreetly. Before he brings his employers into disrepute.”
“I trust you mean his former employers.” Zackheim turned again to the chalky-faced young man in the blue blazer. “And the identification is good?”
“Very,” Randall Denning said. “As we’ve discussed, Tarquin has changed his physiognomy, by surgical means—”
“The typical resort of an agent gone rogue,” Wexler put in.
“But the basic facial indices are constant,” Denning went on. “You can’t alter the distance between the orbital cavities—the eye sockets—or the slope of the supraorbital foramen. You can’t change the curve of the mandible and maxilla without destroying dentition.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Zackheim barked.
The imaging expert glanced around him. “The point’s just that plastic surgery can’t touch the basic bone structure of the skull. The nose, cheeks, chin—these are superficial protuberances. Computer-assisted facial identification systems can be set to ignore them and zero in on what can’t be changed.” He handed Zackheim yet another photograph. “If that is Tarquin”—the image showed a man in his thirties, a distinctively Western face in a crowd of Asians—“then so is this.” He tapped his hard rubber stylus at the surveillance photograph of the man at the Montreal airport.
The deputy director of Consular Operations, Franklin Runciman, had said little at the meeting. He was a rugged-looking man, with piercing blue eyes, a heavy bro
w, strong features. His suit looked expensive, a blue-gray worsted with a subtle windowpane pattern. Now he sat glowering. “I see no reason to postpone a decision,” he said at last.
Zackheim had been perplexed, even annoyed, by Runciman’s decision to attend the meeting; Zackheim had been tasked with leading the team, but the presence of a more senior officer could not but undermine his authority. Now he gave the deputy director an expectant look.
“Alerts will be relayed to all of our stations and posts,” the Cons Ops man said in a rumbling voice. “And a ‘retrieval’ team”—he pronounced the euphemism with vague distaste—“must be tasked and deployed. Capture or terminate.”
“I say we bring in the other agencies,” Zackheim said, clenching his jaw. “The FBI, the CIA.”
A slow head shake from Runciman. “We’ll outsource if we need to, but we don’t drag in our American colleagues. I’m old-school. I’ve always believed in the principle of self-correction.” He paused and turned his piercing gaze on Ethan Zackheim. “At Cons Ops, we clean our own litter box.”
EIGHTEEN
PARIS
When had it happened—and what, exactly, had happened? There were surprises everywhere. One of them was Laurel herself. Once again, she had undergone a shattering experience—yet remained unshattered. Her resilience was remarkable and heartening. The proximity of death had only heightened emotions already latent within them. Fear was one of them, but there were others, too. More and more, he found, he had started to think in the first-person plural: there was an us where there had once been merely a me. It was a thing compounded of words and looks, of shared emotions—both exhilaration and despondency. Of pain and respite from pain. And quiet laughter. It was a thing of gossamer, and he knew of nothing stronger.
It seemed a small miracle. They created a normalcy where none had existed; they conversed as if they had known each other for years. Asleep in bed—he grew aware of this last night—their bodies cupped each other’s naturally, limbs gently interlaced, as if they had been made for it. When their bodies coupled in love-making, there was bliss, and, at moments, there was something even more elusive—something very like serenity.
“You make me feel safe,” Laurel said after a while as they lay together beneath the sheets. “Is it insulting to be told that?”
“No, though it might be tempting fate,” Ambler replied with a small smile. He had, in fact, thought about changing hotels and decided against it; the risks of a new registration at a new establishment exceeded the risks of maintaining the old.
“But then, you already knew that’s how I felt, didn’t you?”
Ambler did not reply.
“It’s funny,” she said. “I feel like you know everything there is to know about me, even though that can’t really be.”
My Ariadne, he thought. My beautiful Ariadne. “There are facts, and there are truths. I don’t know the facts. Maybe, though, I know a few truths.”
“Because of the way you see,” she said. “It must make some people uncomfortable. That sense of being seen through.” She paused. “I guess I ought to feel that way, too. Like my slip is showing, only a thousand times worse. But I don’t. Never have. It’s the darnedest thing. Maybe I don’t care if my slip is showing around you. Maybe I want you to see me for what I am. Maybe I’m tired of being looked at by men who just see what they want to see. Being seen through is almost a treat.”
“There’s a lot to look at,” Ambler said, smiling and pulling her close.
She interlaced her fingers with his again. “It reminds me of what kids say, sometimes: ‘I know that you know that I know that you know . . .’ ” A slow smile appeared on her face, as if the smile on Ambler’s face had spread to hers. “Tell me something about myself.”
“I think you’re one of the most sensitive people I’ve ever met,” Ambler said steadily.
“You should get out more.” She grinned.
“When you were a girl, you were different from the others, weren’t you? Maybe a little bit on the outside of things. Not an outsider, exactly, but you maybe had an ability to see things that others didn’t, including yourself. The ability to, you know, pull the camera back a little bit.”
Laurel was not smiling any longer. She was looking at him now, transfixed.
“You’re a caring person, an honest one, too, but you have a hard time letting people in, letting people know the real Laurel Holland. Once you finally do let somebody in, though, it’s pretty much for keeps, as far as you’re concerned. You’re loyal that way. You don’t form friendships fast, but when you form them, they are fast—fast and strong, because they’re for real, not for show. And sometimes, maybe, you wish that you could form personal relationships more easily, that you could slip in and out of them the way other people do.” Ambler paused. “Is this making sense to you?”
She nodded silently.
“I think you’re a deeply trustworthy person. Not a saint—you can be selfish; you can have a temper, too, sometimes, and lash out at people close to you. But when it really counts, you’re there. You understand the importance of being a good friend. It’s important to you that you seem in control, but often you don’t feel that way. It’s almost an act of will, of discipline, to keep yourself calm and in command of situations, which also means being in command of yourself.”
She blinked slowly but remained silent.
“There have been times in the past when you’ve been too honest with your feelings,” Ambler went on. “When you felt that you revealed too much of yourself. And that’s made you a little cautious sometimes, even a little reserved.”
Laurel took a deep breath, let it out unsteadily. “There’s just one thing you missed—or maybe you were too polite to mention,” she said quietly. There was a catch in her voice. Her eyes were inches from his, and he could see her pupils widen.
Ambler pressed his mouth to hers and took her in his arms, a long, slow embrace that was almost an act of lovemaking in itself. “There are some things that don’t need to be put in words,” he whispered after a while, and he sensed—he knew—that the glow that suffused him also suffused her: brightening, warming, like a dawn within them.
Later, as they lay together, bodies slick with sweat and sheets almost randomly intertwined with limbs, she gazed at the ceiling and spoke. “My dad was a Vietnam vet,” she said, sounding far away. “A good man, I think, but damaged, almost like my husband got to be. You might think I was drawn to that type, but I don’t think so. It was just my lot in life.”
“He hit your mom?”
“Never,” she said sharply. “Never. He would have lost her forever if he raised a hand to her even once, and he knew it, too. People talk about uncontrollable rages. Very few of ’em are really uncontrollable all the way. The tide sweeps up the beach, but it won’t go past the sandbags. Most people have sandbags of a sort in their lives. The things you won’t say, the things you won’t do. My dad grew up on a dairy farm, and if he had his druthers, he’d have had me raised with a milk pail in my hands. But he had a family to support. And there were certain economic realities to be faced. So I grew up in a subdivision in Virginia, outside of Norfolk. He worked in an electrical equipment plant; Mom worked as a receptionist at a doctor’s office.”
“Maybe something else that drew you to the medical profession.”
“The suburbs of the medical profession, anyway.” Laurel closed her eyes for a moment. “The place where I grew up wasn’t much of anything, but it had a good school district, and that’s something they cared about. Good arts program, I guess. They thought I’d do well there. Mom cared a lot about that. Maybe too much. You could tell she used to think Dad was going to make more of himself than he ever did. She kept telling him to ask for a raise, a promotion. Then one day she ended up talking to some people at the plant—it might have been a bake sale at the school, some event like that—and, well, I didn’t put it together right away, but I guess she was led to understand that the plant was only keeping Dad on the
payroll in the first place out of kindness. His Vietnam service and all. So a promotion wasn’t really in the cards. Mom changed a little after that. I think she was sad at first, and then businesslike. Like she’d just given up on him, but she’d made her bed and had to lie in it.”
“Which left you.”
“As a vehicle for hoping? Yeah.” A trace of bitterness entered her voice. “And when I won my first Oscar and thanked her in front of a billion television viewers, well, you can see how all her dreams came true.”
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Ambler said gently. “They both are.”
“I guess she was never prouder than when they saw me play Maria in the high-school production of West Side Story,” Laurel said, her voice thickening. Ambler saw that her eyes had grown moist. She turned to him, but in her voice was the distance of something old newly recollected. “I can still hear my dad hooting and whistling when the curtain came down, and stamping his foot. But it was when they were driving home that it happened.”
“You don’t have to say it, Laurel.”
Tears were rolling down her cheeks, dampening the pillow beneath her head. “There was an icy patch on some intersection and a municipal trash hauler fish-tailed there, and Dad just wasn’t paying attention, he’d had a couple of beers and they were both happy, and he was driving a company truck when he plowed into the van, and it was filled with electrical equipment. The truck stopped; the equipment kept flying forward. Crushed them both. They were in the hospital, in a coma, for another two days, and then they both gave out, died within the very same hour.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to clear the wetness from them, striving to regain control. “Maybe it changed me. Maybe it didn’t. But it became part of me, you know? A drop of dioxin in the watershed.”
The Ambler Warning Page 26