by Dean Koontz
"Smells good," McAlister said, stirring cream into his steaming coffee.
Canning had set the table as if he were serving a full meal, everything properly arranged, every item squared off from the nearest other item: placemats, paper napkins, silverware, cups and saucers, a platter of rolls, a butter dish, butter knives, a cream pitcher, sugar bowl, and sugar spoon. He poured his own coffee and set the percolator on a wrought-iron coaster. "The raisin-filled buns are pretty good." He buttered a roll, took a few bites, washed it down with coffee, and waited to hear why McAlister had come to see him.
"I was afraid you might have gone away for your vacation and I'd have trouble locating you," McAlister said.
"I've traveled enough over the last twenty-five years."
McAlister buttered another piece of roll and said, "I was sorry to hear about you and Irene."
Canning nodded.
"Divorce or separation?"
"Separation. For now. Later on—probably a divorce."
"I'm sorry."
Canning said nothing.
"I hope it was amicable."
"It was."
"How long have you been married?"
"Twenty-seven years."
"Traumatic after all that time."
"Not if there's no love involved on either side."
McAlister's blue eyes looked through him as if they were X-ray devices. "I tried to reach you at your house in Falls Church, but Irene sent me here. How long has it been?"
"We split eight weeks ago. I've been renting this apartment since the middle of August."
"The children?"
"Mike's twenty-six. Terri's twenty. So, no custody fight."
"And there's no animosity between you and them?"
"They aren't taking sides." Canning put down his half-eaten roll and wiped his fingers on his napkin. "Let's stop the psychoanalysis. You need me. You want to know if I'm emotionally stable enough to handle a new job. I am. The separation's for the best. And a new assignment, something more interesting than this White House post, would be a tonic."
McAlister studied him for a moment. "All right." He leaned forward, his arms on the table, and folded his hands around his coffee cup as if to warm his fingers. "You must know some of the things that I've uncovered since I came to the agency."
"I read the papers."
"Has any of it shocked you?"
"No. Anyone with a trace of common sense has known for years that the agency's a haven for crackpots. There's a lot of work the agency has to do. Most of it's dirty, ugly, and dangerous. But necessary. It isn't easy to find normal, sensible, decent men to do it."
"But you're normal, sensible, and decent."
"I like to think so. I wouldn't get involved in some of these crazy schemes you've unearthed lately. But there are agents who want to get involved, adolescents playing out the cheapest masturbatory fantasies. But they aren't just on the agency. They're everywhere these days." A fierce, prolonged gust of wind drove rain against the window. The droplets burst and streamed like tears. Or like colorless blood, a psychic intimation of blood to come, Canning thought. "These lunatics got into the agency because they had the proper politics. Back when I joined up, loyalty mattered more than philosophy. But for the last fifteen years, until you came along, applicants who were solid middle-of-the-road independents, like me, were rejected out of hand. A moderate is the same as a leftist to these nuts. Hell, I know men who think Nixon was a Communist dupe. We've been employing neo-Nazis for years. So the newspaper stories don't shock or even surprise me. I just hope the agency can survive the housecleaning."
"It will. Because, as you said, we need it."
"I suppose," Canning said.
"Did you know any of the agents who have been indicted?"
"I've heard some of the names. I never worked with them."
"Well," McAlister said, "what you've read in the newspapers isn't half as shocking as what you'll never read there." He drank the last of his coffee. "I've always believed in the public's right to know . . ."
"But?"
Smiling ruefully, McAlister said, "But since I've learned what the agency's been doing, I've tempered that opinion somewhat. If the worst were made public during our lifetime, the country would be shaken to its roots, blasted apart. The Kennedy assassinations . . . The most hideous crimes . . . They'd riot in the streets." He wasn't smiling any longer. "It wasn't the agency alone. There are other threads. Powerful politicians. Mafiosi. Some of the richest, most socially prominent men in the country. If the people knew how far off the rails this nation went for more than a decade, we'd be ripe for a demagogue of the worst kind."
For the first time since he'd opened the front door and seen McAlister in the hall, Canning realized that the man had changed. At a glance he looked healthy, even robust. But he'd lost ten pounds. His face was more deeply lined than when he'd first assumed the directorship. Behind the aura of youthful energy, he was weary and drawn. His eyes, as blue and clear as they'd ever been, were filled with the sorrow of a man who has come home to find his wife happily gang-banging a group of strange men. In McAlister's case the wife was not a woman but a country.
"It's one of these other horrors, something besides the assassinations, that's brought you here." Canning poured more coffee.
"You don't seem surprised by what I've told you."
"Of course I'm not surprised. Anyone who reads the Warren Report has to be a fool to believe it."
"I guess I was a fool for years," McAlister said. "But now I need a first-rate agent I can trust. A dozen good men are available. But you're the only one I'm even half sure isn't a Committeeman."
Frowning, Canning said, "A what?"
"We've discovered that within the CIA there's another organization, illegal and illicit, a tightly knit cell of men who call themselves The Committee. True Believers, fanatical anti-Communists."
"Masturbating adolescents."
"Yes, but they're dangerous. They have connections with extreme right-wing, paramilitary groups like the Minutemen. They're friendly with certain Mafiosi, and they're not short of patrons among men in New York banking and Texas oil. The Committee had a part in assassinations, other things . . . They answer to no one in government."
"Then why haven't you broken them?"
"We don't know who they are," McAlister said. "We have two names. Two of the men already under indictment. But there are at least twenty or twenty-five others. Hard-core operatives. They'll serve their time rather than do any plea bargaining. They'll never testify against the others. So we're still working on it. I'm setting up a staff of investigators—men who've had no contact whatsoever with the agency, men I know I can trust."
Canning understood that when McAlister spoke of investigators, he meant lawyers, men who approached this kind of problem in terms of subpoenas, grand juries, indictments, prosecutions, and eventual convictions. But for the most part Canning was a field op, a man who liked to take direct action the instant he saw what the trouble was; he was not a paper shuffler. Although he respected the mass of laws upon which civilization was built, he was trained to solve problems quickly by circumventing all authorities and legal channels. He knew McAlister was fully aware of this. Nevertheless, he said, "And you want me on this staff?"
"Perhaps later." Which meant never. "Right now I need you for something more urgent." He sipped his coffee: a dramatic pause. "This is so important and secret that no one must know you've been brought into it. That's why I came to see you instead of sending for you. And that's why I came alone. I was especially careful not to be followed."
That was Canning's cue to ask what this was all about. Instead of that, he said, "What makes you think I'm trustworthy?"
"You're too much of a realist to be a brown shirt. I know you."
"And you are too much of a realist to choose a man for an important assignment because you happen to like him. So what's the rest of the story?"
Leaning back in his chair, McAlister said, "Did you ever
wonder why you were taken off the top job in the Asian bureau?"
"I shouldn't have been."
"Agreed."
"You know why I was?"
McAlister nodded. "I've read the entire agency file on you. It contains a number of unsigned memos from field ops stationed in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand during your tenure there. They complain that you put them under too much restraint."
Canning said, "Too damned many of them were ready to settle any problem with a gun or a knife." He sighed softly. "They didn't even like to stop and think if there might be a better, easier way." He ran one hand over his face. "You mean that's all it took for the director to pull me out of Asia? Unsigned memos?" "Well, there was also Duncan, Tyler, and Bixby."
They were three men who had served under Canning. Karl Duncan and Mason Tyler, who had once operated in Thailand, had tortured to death an American expatriate whom they "suspected" of being involved in illegal arms sales to guerilla leaders. Derek Bixby did his dirty work in Cambodia. He tortured the wife and eleven-year-old daughter of a Cambodian merchant, in front of the merchant's eyes, until he had obtained a hidden set of papers that were en route from Hanoi to a guerilla general who was a close friend of the merchant. Once the documents were in his hands, Bixby murdered the man, wife, and child. In both cases neither torture nor murder was warranted. Infuriated, Canning had seen to it that Duncan, Tyler, and Bixby were not only taken out of Asia but were also dismissed from the agency when they returned Stateside.
"They were animals," Canning said.
"You did the right thing. But Duncan, Tyler, and Bixby had friends in high places. Those friends engineered your withdrawal from Asia and saw you were given a harmless domestic assignment at the White House."
Sharp lines of anger webbed Canning's skin at eyes and mouth.
"Furthermore," McAlister said, "Duncan, Tyler, and Bixby are all quite close to the two men we know are Committeemen. We've reason to believe that Duncan, Tyler, and Bixby are working in a civilian capacity with The Committee and are being paid with misappropriated agency funds. No proof—yet. Anyway, it seems unlikely that you have ever been one of them. Otherwise, why would you have fired those three?" He leaned forward again. "As I said, I'm half sure of you. There's a chance I'll be stabbed in the back. But the odds of that happening are lower with you than with anyone else I know."
Canning rose, took his cup and saucer to the sink and rinsed them thoroughly. He came back and stood at the window, watching the rain that slanted icily across the courtyard and pooled on the bricks. "What is this urgent assignment you have for me?"
Taking a pipe from one jacket pocket and a pouch of tobacco from another, McAlister said, "During the last six months we've been building a new file from dribs and drabs of information—a name here, a rendezvous point there, a dozen rumors; you know how it works in this business—concerning a very special project the Committeemen have going for them."
Canning got a ten-inch circular white-glass ashtray from a cupboard and put it in front of McAlister.
"Five days ago an agent named Berlinson came to me and said he was a Committeeman. He was about to be indicted for his role in several domestic operations that were aimed at destroying the political careers of three potential liberal Presidential candidates. He didn't want to stand trial because he knew he would end up in jail. So he and I reached an agreement. He was quite willing to talk. But as it happens, lower-echelon agents of The Committee know only one or two others in the organization. Berlinson couldn't give me a complete roster. He couldn't tell me who stands at the head of the group. That was quite a disappointment."
"I can imagine."
"But it wasn't a total loss," McAlister said as he tamped the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe. "Berlinson was able to give me a general outline of this special project I'd been hearing about. It centers on an as yet unknown Chinese citizen who has been made, quite literally, into a walking bomb casing for a chemical-biological weapon that could kill tens of thousands of his people. The Committeemen have a code name for him—Dragonfly."
Canning sat down at the table again. "These reactionaries—these idiots intend to wage their own private war against China?"
"Something like that." McAlister struck a match, held the flame to the tobacco, and got his pipe fired up. He carefully put the burnt match in the center of the ashtray.
"Berlinson has no idea who the carrier is?"
"All he knew was that Dragonfly is a Chinese citizen who was in the United States or Canada sometime between New Year's Day and February fifteenth of this year. That doesn't really narrow it down much. Canada has had friendly relations with China considerably longer than we have; she does a great deal of business with them. At any given moment there are at least two hundred Chinese citizens in Canada: government representatives, officials of various Chinese industries, and artists who are involved in cultural exchange programs. In the United Stares, of course, there's the Chinese delegation to the United Nations. And at one time or another during the forty-six days in question, we also played host to a contingent of trade negotiators, a touring group of forty officials from the Central Office of Publications who were here to study American publishing processes and printing methods, and finally, a symphony orchestra from Peking."
"How many suspects are there in both the U.S. and Canada?" Canning asked.
"Five hundred and nine."
"And I take it that Dragonfly, whoever he is, doesn't know anything about what's been done to him."
"That's right. He's an innocent."
"But how could he be? How was it done?"
"It's a long story."
"I'll listen."
McAlister poured himself another cup of coffee.
While he picked up crumbs from his placemat and put them, one at a time, in the center of his paper napkin, Canning listened to McAlister's story and took the facts from it and placed them, one at a time, in the neatly ordered file drawers of his mind. No matter with whom he was talking, no matter where or when, Canning was a good listener. He interrupted only to ask essential questions and to keep the conversation from digressing.
With McAlister, of course, there were no digressions. He recited the facts with so few hesitations and with such economy of words that he might have been retelling a short story that he had committed to memory.
It began with Dr. Olin Eugene Wilson—product of a strict and extremely religious family, witness at the McCarthy Hearings, where he testified against alleged Communists in the Pentagon, John Bircher, and self-styled fascist—who believed implicitly in Shockley's theories of Negro inferiority and the supremacy of the White Race.
Although he had not conceived the specific operation that was now known as the Dragonfly project, Dr. Wilson was the one man without whom the scheme could never have been realized. For thirty years Wilson had worked for the Department of Defense. He was a research biochemist, one of the most brilliant men in his field. The greater part of his important work had been done at Fort Detrick, in Maryland, where he supervised the development of half a dozen chemical and/or biological weapons that could topple an enemy government within seventy-two hours of the declaration of war. In 1969, when President Nixon announced that the United States would no longer engage in research for offensive biological warfare, Wilson was so infuriated that he presented his resignation to the chief of staff at Detrick. Certain highly placed civilian and military officials quickly assured Wilson that the President's speech had been more of a public-relations gimmick than a genuine commitment. Yes, Detrick's labs would be converted into facilities for cancer research. Yes, only weapons projects labeled "defensive" would be developed from this day forward. However . . .
Fort Detrick had already become too much of a target for crusading journalists and peace demonstrators; therefore, it was time to move the CBW program into more modern and less well publicized quarters. As to whether or not the doctor would now be limited to defensive-weapons research . . . Well, they had a qualificatio
n of the President's statement which satisfied Wilson. They explained that once the United States was attacked with a chemical and/or biological weapon, it would have to strike back immediately; and then those weapons which might have been labeled offensive when used for a first strike became defensive the moment they were used for retaliatory purposes. Thus educated in semantics, Wilson returned to work, happy and relatively secure. Within days of the President's speech, Olin Wilson launched a program to study the feasibility of encapsulating anthrax, plague virus, and other disease strains and implanting them within the human body to create a walking biological time bomb that could be triggered either ten minutes from now, ten years from now, or at any moment in between.
"Naturally," Canning said, "Wilson was successful. The agency heard about it. And the Committeemen made Wilson an offer to come over to them."
"Which he did."
Canning frowned. "And Army security, Pentagon security, the security forces at the lab—none of them tumbled to the fact that he was farming out his data?"
"None of them."
In late 1972, loudly professing his disenchantment with the current U.S.-Soviet detente, Olin Wilson resigned from his position with the Department of Defense. By that time his absolute disgust with Nixonian foreign policy was widely known. He was one of a group of five hundred prominent scientists, teachers, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and other professionals who sponsored a series of anti-Communist advertisements in The New York Times. For the Sons of Truth, an up-and-coming right-wing organization similar to the John Birch Society, Wilson wrote a pamphlet entitled Communism, Richard Nixon, and the End of the American Dream. When he quit his job he said he was leaving because of his disillusionment with government policies and because of his despair over new national defense guidelines. He retired on a comfortable pension and on the income he received for speaking before any organization that would have him. For six months he jetted all over the country, addressing as many as five and six groups a week at a fee of seven hundred dollars plus expenses. Gradually, he was called to fewer and fewer podiums, until he began to spend most of his time at home in Alexandria, where he puttered in his garden and wrote angry letters to newspapers and magazines that supported or even gave voice to a liberal cause. A year after he resigned from government service, Wilson was leading such an uneventful life that any government security force that might have been watching him certainly must have decided to pack up and go away and leave him to his retirement. That was when Dr. Wilson went to work for The Committee.