The Ambler Warning

by Robert Ludlum

  For battle.

  What battle? An odd sort of fog swept over his memories again, a hovering opacity. But Ambler . . . no, Tarquin—he was Tarquin—had felt a glinting emotion. If he could retrieve the emotion, he could retrieve the memories that came with it. The emotion was a particular, and a particularly potent, compound: partly guilt, mostly rage.

  The fog thinned. Buildings and people came into view; voices, at first dissolved into a stream of white noise, became audible and distinct. The urgency that drove him became vivid, real, present.

  Tarquin lacked the moral narcissism to suppose that his hands were ever clean, but he was outraged to discover that they had just been made bloody by an unfathomable lapse of professionalism.

  Transience had to be told.

  Still seething with fury and disbelief, Tarquin returned to headquarters in Washington, D.C. A man with a tie, like countless others, in a great stone building, like countless others. He went straight to the stop, to the undersecretary in charge of the Political Stabilization Unit—to Transience.

  And then the unfathomable became the unpardonable. Undersecretary Ellen Whitfield, the patrician director of the Political Stabilization Unit, was someone he knew well, arguably too well. She was a handsome woman with a strong chin, a small, straight nose, and high cheekbones; her chestnut hair set off dark blue eyes that she accentuated with a dab of eye shadow. She was handsome; once, to him, she had been almost beautiful. That had been many years ago, near the beginning of his career, when she was still involved in field ops, and their affair, consummated mainly in Quonset huts in the northern Mariana Islands, lasted less than a month. What happens in Saipan, she told him with a smile, stays in Saipan.

  She applied for an administrative posting at the State Department soon afterward; he accepted his next assignment in the field—his special skills made him indispensable there, they told him. In the ensuing years, their careers diverged in some ways, converged in others. At Cons Ops, she became known for a surpassingly well-organized mind: few administrators were as nimble at processing and prioritizing the various tiers of intelligence and action items. She also showed herself to be adept at office politics—at flattering her superiors without appearing to do so; at wrong-footing those who stood in her path to advancement, again, without ever betraying her intent. A year after receiving her first D.C. posting, she was made associate director of the East Asian and Pacific Affairs desk; two years later she had been seconded to the deputy director of Consular Operations; three years after that, she became a division director in her own right and rapidly revivified the Political Stabilization Unit, expanding its purview and range of operations.

  Within Consular Operations itself, Stab was regarded as highly “proactive”—critics said “reckless”—and now it became far more so. To its critics, the Stab operatives were heedless of the rules and overly aggressive, treating the edicts of international law with all the respect a Boston driver gave to traffic signs. That someone who seemed as prim and controlled as Ellen Whitfield had presided over this transformation took some of her colleagues by surprise. Not Ambler. He knew she had a streak of wildness, a blend of impetuousness and calculation and something that would once have been called devilry. Once, during a humid August in Saipan, he had found it arousing.

  Yet Whitfield—who had earned the civilian rank of undersecretary—was now proving curiously elusive. There were times when Ambler wondered whether their “history” made her uncomfortable around him, but in truth she never seemed that sort of person or showed any sign that she regarded the affair as more than an agreeable pastime during an otherwise tedious posting. An agreeable pastime, agreeably ended. By the fourth time Ambler was told that Undersecretary Whitfield was “in a meeting,” he knew he was being shut out. He had already written up and transmitted his report on the Leung debacle. What he wanted now was accountability. He wanted her to say that she would conduct a full and proper inquiry into this disastrous failure of intelligence. He wanted an acknowledgment that Stab had gone awry and would take steps to set its house in order.

  Surely it was not too much to ask.

  Five days after his arrival at Foggy Bottom, Ambler learned through informal channels that Whitfield had not even filed an official memorandum about his complaint, as standard protocol stipulated. It was an outrage. Whitfield was known, even lauded, for her perfectionist tendencies. Was she so embarrassed by her failure that she refused to make a clean breast of it to the Director of Consular Operations and the Secretary of State? Did she think she could arrange a coverup—given everything that he had managed to find out? He needed to confront her: to hear her explanation.

  He needed to hear it face-to-face.

  He felt a surge of the fury he had known in Changhua. A fury at betrayal. It was now Friday afternoon, the end of a Washington workweek, but not the end of his. I’m sorry, but Undersecretary Whitfield is in a meeting. You can leave another message, if you like. When he phoned an hour later, the assistant’s reply was equally impassive, an underling requested to fend off a pest. I’m sorry, Undersecretary Whitfield has left for the day.

  Insanity! Did she really think she could avoid him—avoid the truth—forever? Livid, he got into a car and drove to Whitfield’s home, in the outskirts of Fox Hollow, a village west of Washington. He knew where she lived, and there would be no evading him there.

  A half hour later he nosed his car past a white post-and-rail fence into the long drive, a graceful, gently curving allée lined with pear trees. The house itself was a tall, stately, Monticello-style structure, with elegantly corniced and quoined facades of weathered red brick, and large bay windows. It was surrounded by artfully pruned magnolias and high-mounded rhododendrons. Broad stone steps led from the circular drive to the carved oak entrance door.

  The Whitfield family, he recalled, had made several industrial fortunes during the nineteenth century, some involving steel smelting and railroad ties, some involving not the manufacture but the export of such products. The family fortune ebbed somewhat in the postwar years, as the family scions moved into sectors more notable for cultural or intellectual prestige than for the generation of wealth—there was a Whitfield at the Metropolitan Museum, at the National Gallery, at the Hudson Institute, as well as a few who had drifted to the more sanitized realms of international banking. But well-managed trust funds ensured that no Whitfield needed to worry overmuch about the brutish business of getting and spending, and, as with the Rockefellers, a family ethic of service had somehow persisted over the decades. The fact that service did not require the repudiation of earthly pelf was clear from the Virginian grandeur of Whitfield’s house. It was stately, rather than showy, but definitely nothing that a government salary would swing.

  Ambler pulled up to the large double doors at the center of the house and got out of his car. He rang the doorbell. Moments later, a woman in a maid’s uniform of worsted black and a frilly white front—a Filipina?—came to the door.

  “I’m Hal Ambler, and I’m here for Ellen Whitfield,” he said, biting off his words.

  “Madame not seeing anybody,” the uniformed woman said. Then, more stiffly, she added, “Madame not here.”

  She was lying, of course. If Ambler hadn’t already known, Whitfield’s voice could be heard from an adjoining room. Ambler pushed past the protesting Filipina, strode down the tiled foyer, and barged into a wood-paneled library, with a large bay window and double-height bookshelves.

  There was Ellen Whitfield, sitting in front of an array of documents with an older man. Ambler stared.

  The man looked familiar somehow. He was silver-haired, scholarly looking, with a prominent forehead; his red silk tie was tightly knotted and disappeared into a buttoned sweater-vest under a tweed jacket. Both of them were absorbed in the papers before them.

  “Madame, I tol’ him you no—” As the silence was broken by the noisily protesting Filipina, both Whitfield and the silver-haired man looked up suddenly, startled and dismayed.


  “Goddammit, Ambler!” Whitfield yelled, surprise now surging into a towering rage of indignation. “What the hell are you doing here?” The older gentleman had turned away from him, as if he had developed a sudden interest in the books on the shelves.

  “You know goddamn well what I’m doing here, Undersecretary Whitfield,” he returned, uttering her title with withering scorn. “I want answers. I’m fed up with your delaying tactics. You think you can dodge me? What are you trying to hide?”

  Whitfield’s face was mottled with fury. “You paranoid son of a bitch! Get out of my house! Get out now! How dare you violate my privacy like this! How dare you!” An outstretched arm pointed to the door. Ambler noticed it was trembling. With rage? Fear? Both, it seemed.

  “You got my memorandum,” Ambler replied icily. “It contains the truth. You think you can bury that truth? You think you can bury me? Well, forget about it. Believe me, I’ve taken precautions.”

  “Look at yourself. Listen to yourself. Your conduct is totally unprofessional. Verging upon the unhinged. Don’t you hear how crazy you sound? In my job, I’ve got to deal with more things than you can possibly imagine. If you want a conference, we can conference first thing Monday. But listen to me, and listen to me hard. If you’re not out of this house immediately, I will have you banished from the services of this country—permanently and irrevocably. Now get the hell out of my sight.”

  Ambler stood, breathing hard, his own anger somewhat preempted by her stormy ire. “Monday,” he said heavily, and he turned to go.

  A few miles outside of Fox Hollow, an EMT box van, with pulsing red lights and siren, suddenly appeared behind him, and he steered to the side of the road. Swiftly the ambulance pulled over in front of him, and another car, a heavy Buick, pulled over behind him, blocking him in. Several men—emergency medical technicians? but something was off—poured out of the ambulance. Others emerged from the sedan behind him. As they pulled him from his car, a hypodermic jabbed gracelessly into his arm, he tried to make sense of what was happening. The men were acting in an official capacity, following orders, behaving with the practiced efficiency of professionals. Yet who were they—and what did they want from him?

  The fog in his mind had not burned off entirely; it hovered over what came after, as it had been over what had come before. As he was strapped onto a gurney, he heard quiet, tense exchanges among the team of medics. Then his consciousness began to waver and dim. It was the beginning of a long twilight.

  It was twilight, too, when Ambler opened his eyes again.

  A few days ago, he had been an “inpatient” at a maximum-security facility. Now he was an ocean away. And he was still not free.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Ambler opened his eyes, focused on the pallid auditor, and began to speak, providing as detailed a recounting of his movements and observations as he could. Time had fogged thousands of details, and yet the lineaments of the episode were now vivid to him.

  “I was afraid you’d blacked out there for a while,” Caston said after Ambler had spoken for five minutes without pausing. “Glad to have you back among the living.” He put down the publication he had been reading, the Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis. “Now will you get the hell off my bed?”

  “Sorry.” Ambler stretched, got up, and sat down on the mustard-colored chair. He must have nodded off. According to his watch, four hours had passed.

  “So Transience was Ellen Whitfield herself?”

  “It was the alias she used back when she was in the field. When the files went digital, all that stuff was lost. No official records were to be retained. Especially when it came to her own records—she wanted a total scrub. She said it was a security precaution.”

  “Explains why the name didn’t pull anything,” Caston said. He regarded the operative silently for a moment. “You want another drink?”

  Ambler shrugged. “They got some mineral water in the minibar?”

  “Oh sure, they got some Evian. With the current exchange rate, it comes out to $9.25 for five hundred milliliters. That’s, what, 16.9 ounces. So it’s like fifty-five cents an ounce. Fifty-five cents for an ounce of water? Enough to make me throw up.”

  Ambler sighed. “I guess I should admire your precision.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m rounding like crazy.”

  “Please tell me you don’t have a family.”

  Caston reddened.

  “You must drive them crazy.”

  “Not at all,” the auditor said, almost smiling. “Because, you see, they don’t listen to a word I say.”

  “That must drive you crazy.”

  “Actually, it suits me just fine.” There was a funny look on the auditor’s face for a moment, and Ambler caught a glimpse of an attitude that was almost worshipful; the dry-as-dust auditor was a doting father, Ambler realized with surprise. Then Caston returned to the matter at hand, abruptly businesslike. “The man who was with Undersecretary Whitfield, seated in her library—describe him to me in as much detail as you can.”

  Ambler now looked off into the distance and brought the image to mind. A man in his sixties. Silver hair, carefully groomed, above a high forehead. The forehead was remarkably unlined, the face fine featured and studious looking, the cheekbones high, the chin strong. Ambler started to describe the figure he recalled.

  Caston listened and again lapsed into silence. Then he stood up, agitated; a vein was pulsing on his forehead. “It can’t be,” he breathed.

  “It’s what I remember,” Ambler said.

  “You’re describing . . . but it’s impossible.”

  “Out with it.”

  Caston fiddled with his laptop computer, which he had plugged into the phone jack. After typing in a few commands into a search engine, he stepped aside and gestured for Ambler to take a look. The screen was filled with the image of a man. The very man Ambler had seen at Whitfield’s house.

  “That’s him,” Ambler confirmed, his voice hard with tension.

  “Do you know who that man is?”

  Ambler shook his head.

  “His name is Ashton Palmer. Whitfield studied with him when she was a graduate student.”

  Ambler shrugged. “So?”

  “Later she repudiated him and everything he stood for. Had no contact with him whatever. She wouldn’t have had a career otherwise.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Ashton Palmer—the name doesn’t ring any bells?”

  “Only vaguely,” Ambler said.

  “Maybe you’re too young. There was a time, twenty, twenty-five years ago, when he was the brightest light of the foreign policy establishment. Wrote some widely reprinted articles in Foreign Affairs. Both political parties were wooing him. He gave seminars in the Old Executive Office Building, in the West Wing, in the goddamn Oval Office. People hung on his every word. He was given an honorary appointment in the State Department, but he was bigger than that. He was destined to be the next Kissinger: one of those men whose vision leaves an imprint on history, for good or bad.”

  “So what happened?”

  “A lot of people would say he self-destructed. Or maybe he just miscalculated. He came to be recognized as an extremist—a dangerous fanatic. He may have figured that his political and intellectual authority had reached the level where he could express his views frankly, and win people over to them by the simple fact that it was he who was making the arguments. If so, he was wrong. The views he expressed were dangerous, and would have put this country on a collision course with history. He gave a particularly incendiary speech at the Macmillan Institute for Foreign Policy, in D.C., and afterward a number of countries, thinking that he represented the government, or some faction of the government, actually threatened to recall their ambassadors. Can you imagine?”

  “Hard to.”

  “The Secretary of State spent all night working the phones. Practically overnight, Palmer became persona non grata. He took up a teaching position in the Ivy
Leagues, built an academic center of his own, was appointed to the board of directors of a somewhat fringe think tank in Washington. This image is taken from the Harvard Web site. But anyone at State who was too closely associated with him became an object of suspicion.”

  “So none of his people got anywhere.”

  “Actually, there are lots of Palmerites, all throughout government. Brilliant students, graduates of Harvard’s Kennedy School or its graduate program in government. But if you want to have a career, anyway, you can’t admit to being a Palmerite. And you certainly can’t maintain any connection to the old rogue.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Yet you saw the two of them together—and that doesn’t.”

  “Slow down.”

  “We’re talking about a major player of the State Department in the company of Professor Ashton Palmer. Do you realize how explosive that is? Do you realize how utterly ruinous that could have been to her? As a great American jurist once said, ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant.’ And it was the one thing they couldn’t afford.”

  Ambler narrowed his eyes, brought back Ellen Whitfield’s rage-mottled countenance: now he understood the fear that he sensed in her. “So this is what it was all about.”

  “I wouldn’t hazard that it was all about that.” Caston was precise, as ever. “But for a high-ranking member of the State Department, maintaining ties with Palmer was career suicide. As the head of the Political Stabilization Unit, especially, Whitfield simply couldn’t afford to have any ongoing association with Palmer.”

  Ambler leaned back and reflected. Whitfield, a glib and fluent liar, could probably have explained away Palmer’s presence to anybody else. But Ambler was the one person she could never hope to deceive.

  That’s why he was railroaded. That was the intelligence she couldn’t afford to have leaked. The tape of his paranoid ravings, then, was an insurance policy, establishing that nothing he said could be taken at face value.