The Ambler Warning

by Robert Ludlum

  “Thing is, there have been some high-level communications between State and the DCI,” Norris said. His forehead was gleaming with sweat and flashed in the slanting late-afternoon sun. “The message we’re getting is, the investigation is interfering with a live special-access operation.”

  “And what are the details of that operation?”

  Norris shrugged with his whole upper body. His face was darkened with a mixture of annoyance and repugnance, neither directed at Caston. “Special-access, right? We haven’t been entrusted with that information,” he said, sounding flustered. “They say Tarquin’s in Paris. They’ll pick him up there.”

  “Pick him up or pick him off?”

  “Who the hell knows? It’s like a gate has slammed down. Beyond what I’ve said, we know bupkes.”

  “The proper response to an outrage,” Caston said, “is to be outraged.”

  “Goddammit, Clay. We’ve got no choice on this. This isn’t a game. The DCI himself is saying hands off or heads off. You hearing me? The DCI himself.”

  “That son of a bitch wouldn’t know a polynomial from a polyp,” Caston snapped. “It’s wrong.”

  “I know it’s wrong,” Norris flared. “A goddamn institutional power play. Nobody in the intel community wants to acknowledge the primacy of Central Intelligence. And until we’ve got the backing of the commander in chief and the Senate, it isn’t going to happen, either.”

  “I really don’t like to be interrupted,” Caston persisted. “Once I begin an investigation . . .”

  Norris shot him an exasperated look. “What you think, or I think—that’s really the least of it. There are procedural principles at stake. But the fact is, the deputy director caved on this, the DCI has made his decision, and it’s our job to fall into line.”

  Caston was silent for a long moment. “Don’t you find this whole thing irregular?”

  “Well, sure.” Norris began to pace unhappily.

  “It’s damned irregular,” Caston said. “Doesn’t sit well with me.”

  “Me, neither. And it doesn’t make a bit of difference. You’re closing the books, and so am I. Then we’re burning the books. And we’re forgetting we ever opened them. That’s our marching orders.”

  “Damned irregular,” Caston repeated.

  “Clay, you gotta choose your battles,” Norris said in a defeated tone.

  “Don’t you find,” the auditor replied, “that it’s always your battles that choose you?” He turned on his heel and started to walk out of the ADDI’s office. Who the devil was calling the shots, anyway?

  Caston continued to brood as he returned to his desk. Perhaps one irregularity deserved another. His eyes darted from the files on his desk to those in Adrian’s less tidy work space, and the wheels in his head kept turning.

  They say Tarquin’s in Paris. They’ll pick him up there.

  Finally, he took out a yellow pad of paper and began to make a list. Pepto-Bismol. Ibuprofen. Maalox. Imodium. It wouldn’t do to travel without such medicinal precautions. He’d heard about “traveler’s tummy.” He shivered as he contemplated the prospect of getting into an airplane. It wasn’t about heights, the fear of crashing, or the sense of enclosure. It was the prospect of breathing in the endlessly recycled breath of his fellow passengers . . . some of whom could well have tuberculosis or some other airborne mycobacterial infection. The whole affair was so unsanitary. He would be assigned a seat from which some flight attendant had sponged up vomit earlier in the day. Intestinal parasites could lurk in every crevice. Blankets would be distributed and with them long spirochete-ridden hairs clinging to them by static.

  He had a Merck Manual in a lower desk drawer, and it was all he could do to keep himself from starting to flip through the index.

  He exhaled noisily, his sense of dread deepening, and put down his pen.

  Once he arrived, there would be the repugnance of foreign food to cope with. France would have its own parade of horrors; there was no getting around it. Snails. Frogs’ legs. Mold-veined cheeses. The distended livers of force-fed geese. He didn’t know the language; communication problems would be a constant peril. He might order chicken and get, instead, the flesh of some revolting creature that tasted just like chicken. In a tuberculoid-weakened state, such mishaps could extract an even greater toll.

  He shuddered. It was a very heavy burden he was taking on. He would not do so if he had not been sure that the stakes were very high.

  He picked up his pen again and began making further notes.

  Finally, after filling most of the front sheet with his neat script, he looked up and swallowed hard. “Adrian, I’m going to be traveling. To Paris. On vacation.” He tried to keep the dread out of his voice.

  “That’s super,” said Adrian with inappropriate enthusiasm. “A week or two?”

  “I’d think so,” Caston said. “What does a person normally pack on such a trip?”

  “Is this a trick question?” Adrian asked.

  “If so, the trick’s not on you.”

  Adrian pursed his lips contemplatively. “What do you usually take on vacations?”

  “I don’t go on vacations,” Caston replied with wounded dignity.

  “Well, when you travel.”

  “I hate traveling. Never do it. Well, except to pick up the kids from camp, if that counts.”

  “No,” Adrian said. “I don’t think that does count. Paris will be great, though. You’ll have an incredible time.”

  “I very much doubt that.”

  “Then why are you going?”

  “I told you, Adrian.” A rictus-like display of teeth. “Vacation. Nothing to do with work at all. Nothing to do with our investigation, which, I have just been officially instructed, is to be discontinued.”

  Comprehension dawned on Adrian’s face. “You must find that . . . irregular.”

  “Highly.”

  “Verging on the anomalous.”

  “Quite.”

  “Got any instructions for me?” Adrian brandished a ballpoint pen. “Shifu?” There was a glint of excitement in his eyes.

  “I do have a few, now that you mention it.” Caston allowed himself a small smile as he leaned back in his chair. “Listen well, Little Grasshopper.”

  TWENTY

  PARIS

  Within a few hundred yards of the Place de la Concord, the rue St. Florentin was an elegant Haussmann-style block, with spindly wrought-iron balconies adorning tall, multipaned windows. Red awnings sheltered the storefront windows of upscale libraries and perfumeries, which alternated with the offices of foreign bureaucracies. Including the one on 2 rue St. Florentin. It was the Consular Section of the U.S. embassy and the last place Ambler should show himself. Yet in that seeming recklessness lay the rationale of his decision.

  After what had happened at the Luxembourg Gardens, there was little doubt in Ambler’s mind that Consular Operations stations, here and around the world, would be on alert for Tarquin. Paradoxically, it was an anxiety he could exploit.

  It was partly a matter of knowing what one was looking for, and Ambler did. He knew that the clerical services offered by the “consular section” at 2 rue St. Florentin were a perfect cover for the Cons Ops station. On the ground floor, hapless tourists with lost passports lined up and filled out forms given out by a clerk who had all the animation of a funeral director. When it came to non-citizens in particular, it would not do to get anyone’s hopes up. Visa applications were processed at the pace of a snail with Parkinson’s.

  None of the visitors or regular employees ever thought to wonder what took place on the upper floors; to wonder why they insisted on a separate cleaning service from that employed by the visa and passport processors and used different exits and entrances. The upper floors: Paris Sector, Cons Ops. A realm that, as Fenton’s new request had proved, had decided that a former HVA known as Tarquin was beyond salvage.

  He would try to enter the lion’s den—but only if he could be certain that the lion had left it
.

  The lion in question was one Keith Lewalski, a corpulent man of sixty who ran the Consular Operations’ Paris Sector with an iron fist and a level of paranoia that was more suited to midcentury Moscow than to contemporary Western Europe. The resentment, even scorn, that he inspired among his underlings was a matter of indifference to him; those to whom he reported viewed him as a solid manager, with a record free of any notable failures. He had risen as far he had wished to, had never harbored any further ambitions. Ambler knew him only by reputation, but the reputation was a formidable one, and Ambler had no intention of putting it to the test.

  It was all in Laurel’s hands.

  Had that been a mistake? Was he placing her in jeopardy? Yet he could think of no other means to accomplish what he needed to accomplish.

  He took a chair at a nearby café and glanced at his watch. If Laurel had succeeded, he should see the results at any moment now.

  And if she failed? A cold fear washed over him.

  His instructions for her had been detailed, and she had memorized them thoroughly. But she was not a professional; would she be able to improvise, to deal with the unexpected?

  If all had gone according to their schedule, she would already have placed a phone call from the American embassy at 2 avenue Gabriel; he would have done so himself, but he could not take the chance that the consulate switchboards hadn’t been equipped with voiceprint analyzers. Yet had she been able to do it?

  They had discussed various scenarios, various pretexts, various eventualities. She was to have presented herself to the public affairs section as the personal assistant of a well-known museum curator, one who was involved in the International Partnerships Among Museums program and who had dispatched her to retrieve an agenda for an upcoming meeting. The pretext was as simple and vague as that. It had been easy enough to gather enough plausible details from the embassy’s Web site. Ambler was also counting on the fact that the embassy’s cultural affairs department was disorganized to the point of dysfunction. Its staffers were continually tripping over one another’s shoes, variously duplicating or dropping administrative tasks. The curator’s assistant would have been sent up to the fourth floor, while the apparent error or miscommunication was sorted through. While there, she would have asked to use a private telephone to call her boss and explain the mix-up.

  Then her instructions were to dial the number he had given her, using the particular argot he had prepared her with, and so convey an urgent summons to Keith Lewalski. A State Department dignitary from Washington had arrived at the embassy; a debriefing with Mr. Lewalski was sought, immediately. The consulate switchboard would have authenticated the call as originating from the U.S. embassy; the special words and phrases employed would convey the urgency.

  Laurel’s assignment required little by way of acting but a great deal by way of precision. Could she do it? Had she done it?

  Ambler glanced at his watch again, trying not to think of all that could have gone wrong. Five minutes later, as he watched an aging, obese bureaucrat emerge from 2 rue St. Florentine with a harried air and get into a limousine, he felt a pulse of relief. She had done it.

  Could he?

  As soon as the limousine turned the corner, Ambler strode into the building with an air of someone jaded but resolute. “Passport applications to the left, visa applications to the right,” said a bored-looking man in a uniform. He sat at what looked like a schoolroom’s chair desk. On it was a cup filled with golf pencils—presharpened three-and-a-half-inch eraser-less pencils. They probably went through a couple of dozen a day.

  “Official business,” Ambler grunted to the uniformed man, who directed him to the back with a brusque nod. Ignoring the lines at the other counters, Ambler walked up to the “Official Inquiries” desk. A heavyset young woman sat at the counter, a preprinted list of office supplies spread out before her. She was ticking off boxes.

  “Arnie Cantor around?” Ambler said.

  “Just a sec,” the woman said. He watched her wander back through a door. An efficient-looking young man trotted back to the counter moments later.

  “You wanted Arnie Cantor?” he asked. “Who can I say was asking for him?”

  Ambler rolled his eyes. “Either he’s here or he’s not here,” he said, exuding a sense of supreme boredom. “Start with that.”

  “He’s not here at the moment,” the young man said carefully. He wore his hair short—corporate short, not military short—and had the open-faced look that junior clandestine types made a point of cultivating.

  “Meaning he’s in Milan, shtupping the principessa? No, don’t answer that.”

  The young man cracked a smile despite himself. “Never heard her called that,” he murmured. He gave Ambler a slightly overrehearsed look of complete candor. “Maybe I can help you.”

  “It’s above your pay grade, trust me,” Ambler replied testily. He glanced at his watch. “Aw, shit. You guys are a complete joke, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Not half as sorry as you’re gonna be.”

  “If you’ll tell me who you are . . .”

  “You don’t know who I am?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Then the assumption you should make is that you’re not supposed to know who I am. You smell to me like you’re a couple of weeks out of the incubator. Do yourself a favor. When you’re over your head, call for a lifeguard.”

  The incubator—Cons Ops slang for the special training program that all field agents had to undergo. The young man gave Ambler a crooked smile. “What do you want me to do?”

  “You got a couple of choices, don’t you? You can get Arnie on the phone—I’ll give you Francesca’s number if you don’t have it. Or you can rustle up one of your desk cowboys upstairs. I’m the bearer of news, comprenez-vouz? And the sooner you get me out of the sight lines of the civvies out here, the better. In fact, let’s go now.” He glanced at his watch again, dramatizing his impatience. “Because I really don’t have any more time. And if you fuckups were on the ball, I wouldn’t have had to drag my sorry ass here in the first place.”

  “But I’ll need to see some identification?” The request turned into a query; the young agent felt wrong-footed, uncertain.

  “Man, you are going down for the third time. I got no shortage of identification—for five different identities. I told you I got dragged in here from the field. You think I got my real papers on me?” Ambler broke off. “Hey, don’t let me give you a hard time. I was once standing exactly where you are now, you know that? I remember what it’s like.”

  Ambler stepped behind the counter and pressed the button to the accordion-doored elevator a few yards away.

  “You can’t go up there by yourself,” the young man said.

  “I’m not,” Ambler replied breezily. “You’re coming with me.”

  The young man looked bemused but followed Ambler inside the elevator. The authority and assurance in the stranger’s voice were far more effective than any certificate or form of identification could have been. Ambler pressed the button for the third floor. Despite the antique-looking fixtures—the accordion gate, the leather-clad door with the small window—the machinery itself was new, as Ambler expected, and when the elevator opened again, he stepped into what looked like an entirely different building.

  Not an unfamiliar one, however. It looked like any number of divisions at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Rows of desks, flat-screen computers, telephone units. Rows of pails with shredders affixed to their tops—standard State Department protocol after the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Most of all it was the personnel who looked familiar: not as individuals but as types. White shirts, repp ties: with small adjustments, they could be employees of IBM from the early sixties, the heyday of the American engineer.

  Ambler quickly scanned the room, identifying the senior-most officer moments before the man—pigeon-chested, wide-hipped, a narrow, priggish face with
heavy black eyebrows, hair that flopped over his forehead in a manner that must once have been collegiate-cool—rose to his feet. Keith Lewalski’s second-in-command. He had been seated at a corner desk in a room that had no private offices.

  Ambler did not wait for his approach. “You,” he called brusquely to the pigeon-chested man. “Come over here. We need to talk.”

  The man walked over with a look of perplexity.

  “How long you been stationed here?” Ambler demanded.

  A brief pause before he spoke. “Who are you, exactly?”

  “How long, goddammit?”

  “Six months,” he replied cautiously.

  Ambler spoke to him in a low voice. “You get the Tarquin alert?”

  A fractional nod.

  “Then you know who I am—who we are. And you know better than to ask any more questions.”

  “You’re with the retrieval team?” The man spoke in a hushed voice. There was anxiety in his expression, and a measure of envy, too—a bureaucrat speaking to a professional assassin.

  “There is no retrieval team, and you never met me,” Ambler said, his voice like gravel, even as he assented to the query with a fractional nod of his own. “That’s how we’re going to play it, you understand? Any problems with that—any problems with us—you take it up with the undersecretary, you got that? Though if you’re interested in career longevity, I’d think twice about it. People are putting their asses on the line out there, so you can keep your fat asses on the chairs in here. I lost a man today. If our investigation reveals that you’ve been slacking on the job, I’m going to be ripshit. And so’s everyone in my chain of command. Let me remind you: time is of the essence.”

  The pigeon-chested man extended a hand. “I’m Sampson. What do you need?”

  “It’s mop-up at this point,” Ambler said.

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “Target’s been eliminated, as of 0900 hours.”

  “Fast work.”

  “Faster than we feared. Messier than we’d hoped.”

  “I understand.”

  “I very much doubt that, Sampson.” Ambler’s voice was imperious, authoritative. “We’re concerned about your little boat over here. Worried you may have sprung a leak.”