Jack in the Box

by John Weisman

  O’Neill’s knuckles were white as they gripped the leather-covered steering wheel. “Should I repeat myself again, Sam, or just start hiding my Easter eggs?”

  SHORTLY AFTER FOUR, Michael O’Neill deposited Sam Waterman outside a rural post office, an ugly, one-story redbrick shoe box of a building, separated from a volunteer fire department by a narrow alley. Across the two-lane blacktop sat a country diner, already closed for the day, and a gas station, still open. “End of the line for me, Sam.”

  Sam opened the car door. “Now what?”

  “Now, you wait here,” the lawyer said. “You’ll be picked up.”

  Waterman stretched. He walked around the Mercedes’s grille, leaned over the open driver’s side window, and put his big hands on the sill. The rain had let up: it was drizzling. It had also turned quite cold, and he wasn’t wearing a coat. “Picked up.”

  “Yup.”

  “When?”

  O’Neill checked his watch and shivered in the chill. “Soon, I hope, for your sake.” He looked up at Sam. “Look, friend. this is where I get off. I was asked to find you. I found you. I was instructed to drop you here. Consider yourself dropped. This is obviously a compartmented op, Sam. And just as obviously, I haven’t been cleared for the next compartment.”

  Sam took a single step backward, away from the vehicle. “Okay, Michael—fair enough.”

  “Happy birthday, Cyrus. Many happy returns.” The tinted window ascended, the Mercedes reversed, and headed off in the direction it had come.

  Sam looked up at the post office facade. It told him he was in Round Hill, Virginia 20142. He pulled on the post office door and walked into the outer lobby. There were rows of mailboxes along two of the walls. A thick sheaf of wanted posters hung by the door, next to a bulletin board to which were thumbtacked half a dozen notices about lost cats and dogs. Sam thumbed through the wanted posters to see if there was anyone he knew.

  He hadn’t perused a dozen when bright headlights flashed rapidly three times through the glass door. Sam looked up. Eight feet away was the imposing snout of a big black Range Rover with headlights, driving lights, and fog lamps all turned on. Another triple flash of halogens summoned him impatiently. He pushed on the door with his shoulder and stepped outside.

  Senator T. Randall Arthur opened the heavy door, slid off the tan butter leather upholstery, and exited the big SUV. “Thanks for coming on such short notice, Sam.”

  The senator pulled off pigskin driving gloves, stuffed them in his jacket pocket, and stuck his hand out for Sam to take. “Good to see you, Sam, my boy. It’s been a while.”

  A while, Sam thought. A while? It had been two years. Two long years, since Sam made his surreptitious visit to the bug-proof “bubble” used by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and committed truth.

  He’d told the senator, who had been Sam’s company commander in Vietnam, about the murder of Pavel Baranov. After which, his former CO had turned political cutthroat and promptly set in motion the chain of events that ended Sam’s career.

  Which is why Sam put his spine up against the cold redbrick wall of the post office and kept his hands at his side.

  He watched as the senator’s extended arm lowered hydraulically slow until it was perpendicular to the ground.

  “I can understand your reticence,” Rand Arthur said, his deep voice placating in its tone. “That’s one reason I called on my personal attorney Michael O’Neill to deliver you. I doubted you’d have come if the request came directly from me.”

  So Edward P. SAMGRASS was Rand’s lawyer. That was something O’Neill had never ever mentioned. Sam crossed his arms. “I was delivered according to your instructions. What’s up, Senator?”

  “I need your help, my boy.”

  There was a certain arrogance, Sam had always thought, in the senator’s calling him “my boy.” They were, after all, only five or perhaps six years apart in age. And yet, Rand Arthur had done it as far back as Vietnam.

  Sam gave his old CO a quick once-over. He looked every inch the country squire, the senator did. Double-vented tweed jacket cut in the British style over a soft cashmere turtleneck; thick, dark wool trousers; and stout walking shoes with cleated soles. Yes, Rand Arthur looked exactly like one of your classic, stiff-upper-lipped English shits.

  Sam remained where he was, arms crossed. “I don’t think you need my help, Senator. You seem to do pretty well on your own these days.”

  “Sam—please.” Rand Arthur came around the hood of the Land Rover and opened the passenger-side door. “At least let’s talk privately.”

  “Privately? Does that mean you won’t call the DCI afterwards and spill your guts?”

  “Sam, you gave me no choice. I was compelled to inform the Agency about our meeting. Those are the rules.”

  “It would have been nice if you’d explained the rules to me beforehand.”

  Rand Arthur shook the Range Rover’s door. “Sam, please.”

  Sam made him wait a full minute. But finally he yielded, noting with some grim satisfaction that the senator held the door for him two-handed, like a hotel doorman.

  When he pushed it closed, the seal was so tight Sam’s ears popped. The tan leather seat surface was warm. A digital readout in the dashboard told Sam that the interior was sixty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. The senator trotted past the headlights, opened his own door, and climbed in, popping Sam’s ears a second time. He settled his well-tailored posterior on the seat, attached his seat belt, gave Sam a professional, reassuring smile, then stepped on the brake and reached for the shift lever.

  Sam brushed the senator’s arm aside, turned the ignition key to “off,” snatched it from its socket, and held it securely in his big hand. “You said, ‘Let’s talk,’ Senator. Okay, talk.”

  CHAPTER 6

  EARLY IN 2000, Sam knew he was violating DCI Nick Becker’s directive against any officer of the clandestine service contacting members of Congress without authorization when he called his old CO and asked for a confidential meeting in a secure location. But T. Randall Arthur, newly appointed to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, seemed happy to oblige. He welcomed Sam to his hideaway office, then guided him through the subterranean U.S. Capitol maze to the committee’s bug-proof room in the Hart office building. But not alone. Accompanying the two men was one of SSCI’s staff counsels, Virginia Vacario.

  Sam protested. But as Rand Arthur explained it, no one went into the bubble room without a witness. “Too many leaks, my boy,” he’d said to Sam. “The rules have changed. It’s all on-advice-of-counsel legal mumbo jumbo these days.”

  After they’d secured the thick door, Sam told the senator and his legal shadow about Pavel Baranov, described the events surrounding the general’s murder, and laid out Ed Howard’s covert action to destabilize the American intelligence community.

  The senator had sat quietly and listened to his former platoon sergeant’s one-hour presentation, occasionally asking questions as Lawyer Vacario scribbled notes. When Sam had finished, the senator thanked him for coming and ushered him out. And then, on advice of counsel, he used the room’s secure telephone to dial Nick Becker’s direct line and convey the high points of Sam’s monologue.

  Three days later, a story in the Washington Post citing “sources close to the intelligence community” described in broad brushstrokes the 1998 assassination of a Russian CIA agent in Moscow, the unnamed CIA station chief’s expulsion, and Langley’s subsequent embarrassment.

  The following morning Sam was summoned to the DCI’s office, where Nick Becker, brandishing the Post front page, accused Sam of leaking the story to embarrass him. By noon Sam had been banished to Purgatory. The senator never returned Sam’s phone calls.

  SAM SET HIS SHOULDER against the Range Rover’s door and waited, sensing with satisfaction Rand Arthur’s unease.

  “Sam,” the senator finally said, “I am truly, truly sorry. I can see why you—”

  Sam cut him off. “Senator,” he sai
d, “don’t play games. Can the charm and get on with whatever it is you have to say.”

  Rand Arthur grunted, an uncomfortable half laugh. “Still cut-to-the-chase, aren’t you?”

  Sam glanced at the senator with hostile derision. “The Directorate of Operations nomenclature for what you’re doing is called a cold pitch. They don’t work if you dance around. Tell me what you want—and what you’ve got to offer, then I’m outta here.” Sam hooked his thumb toward the lights in the gas station across the road. “They’ll have a phone. I can call a cab.”

  Rand Arthur looked into Sam’s eyes, and saw the determination in his expression. He exhaled a huge sigh that seemed to deflate his whole body. “You’re right,” he said, his tone contrite. “I knew what Nick did to you—and I did nothing about it. For my inaction, Sam, I am honestly sorry. But sometimes, that is the way things work in the real world. If you ever thought it was tough out there”—the senator’s hand waved beyond the Land Rover’s windshield—“then you should spend a few days with me. Politics is brutal, Sam. There are casualties. And loyalty? In the United States Senate, loyalty is a dispensable commodity. The Senate is nothing like the Marine Corps, my boy.” He paused, his eyes moving quickly across Sam’s face.

  The senator’s voice grew stronger and more resonant. “So, yes—I abandoned you. Two years ago I was just another member of Senate Select. But there’s a very good chance I’ll become chairman if the elections go well for us. I can facilitate the improvements in policy and budget and oversight that the intelligence community wants—and more important, that it needs. And if your scalp was a small part of the price I had to pay so I could work my way up the ranks in order to achieve a series of greater goals for the committee—and perhaps the country—well, then so be it, Sam. That’s the real world. And if you can’t deal with what I’m saying, then thanks for coming, walk away, take your cab, and go home. If, however, you want to become a part of something that I believe with all my heart will forever change the course of this nation, then hand me back the keys, fasten your seat belt, and join me for the ride of your life.”

  What garbage. It was drivel. Political smoke and mirrors. “Stow the speeches,” Sam growled. “You’re going to have to earn my trust the way my agents used to earn it—by delivering something tangible. Right now, Senator, you’re nothing more than a blowhard.”

  The flash of anger in Rand Arthur’s eyes told Sam he’d drawn blood. But Sam didn’t let up. “Die karten auf den Tisch legen, Senator.”

  “Sam?”

  “Cards on the table, Senator. Tell me what you’ve got—now.”

  Rand Arthur’s expression changed. “I could tell you,” he said coolly, “but I’d rather show you.”

  Sam made him wait. Then he flipped the keys at the senator, who caught them clumsily.

  Rand Arthur put the big SUV in gear. They drove for fifteen minutes, the road narrow and hilly. The vehicle’s lights played off tall, thick hedgerows rising on either side of the blacktop. The Range Rover came up a short rise, after which it traversed a small wooden bridge. Then the senator braked carefully and steered hard left onto a freshly graveled road that more or less paralleled the creek they’d just crossed.

  The going was slower now, punctuated by the undulating crunch of stones under the tires. The hedgerows gave way to a four-batten fence that stretched off as far as Sam could see. The road before them disappeared beyond the range of the vehicle’s headlights. A mailbox advertising an equine rescue center came into view on the Range Rover’s starboard side. The senator passed it by and went another half mile. There, the road took a gentle turn to the left. Ahead, at the farthest perimeter of the headlights, Sam could make out two imposing pillars. Between the pillars, blocking the road, sat a darkened, four-door vehicle.

  Rand Arthur switched his headlights on/off three times, waited two seconds, then flashed the lights once. The rolling roadblock ignited its parking lights, pulled ahead, and the senator drove past.

  Sam swiveled in his seat and watched as the big Chevy sedan backed up and barred the road.

  “U.S. Capitol police,” the senator said by way of explanation.

  “They provide security out here?”

  “They handle sensitive matters for a lot of senators, including me, if I need them to.”

  Rand Arthur steered slowly around a long, gentle curve. As the tree line off to his right broke, Sam could see a big stone house, bathed in the kind of dramatic lighting often displayed in Architectural Digest. He counted chimneys in the fading light and came up with six. “Impressive place, Senator.”

  “It was my wife’s. She’s dead now.”

  Sam didn’t quite know how to respond. “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be,” Rand Arthur said, quite coldly.

  A second car—a dark Crown Vic—with two men in plain clothes sat adjacent to the three-car garage that had been added as an obvious afterthought. Rand Arthur pulled up next to the car, switched on the Range Rover’s interior lights, and rolled his window down.

  “Reese, this is Mr. Waterman,” he said to a black officer with a shaved head who sat behind the wheel of the sedan. “He’ll be with us for the foreseeable future. He can come and go as he pleases.”

  The policeman peered across the senator’s torso and took a good look at Sam’s face. “Okay, Senator,” he said. ‘Thank you, sir.”

  “Carry on.” Rand Arthur depressed the accelerator and the SUV nudged forward. “I had to tell him something,” the senator said, anticipating Sam’s response.

  “ ‘Foreseeable future'?”

  “I really do think you’ll want to stay once you understand the implications,” the senator said. “We’re roughly the same size, so clothes won’t be a problem. Or, I can send an officer to your apartment and get you what you need.” He stopped the “Range Rover outside the garage, stepped onto the pea gravel, and bid Sam to follow him.

  Footfalls scrunching, they marched around the side of the house, past the accent lighting and the neatly trimmed English boxwood, up a shallow set of stone steps. Rand Arthur opened the unlocked castle-size front door without a key and ushered Sam into a huge, two-story foyer. The place had probably been built in the fifties, then gutted and redone very recently. It was impressive. The foyer floor was dark flagstone. Beyond, he could see a slice of the huge living room, whose wide floorboards were covered by antique Oriental rugs.

  The senator led him past the living room and along a parquet-floored corridor hung with inscribed photographs from the rich and famous interspersed with testimonial plaques until they came to a thick, antique wood door. On the door at chest level was the same kind of twelve-key cipher lock that secured offices at SSCI, or CIA. Blocking the keys with his body so Sam couldn’t watch him enter the combination, the senator punched one-two-three-four-five-six-seven keys in rapid succession. Sam could hear the electronic lock release. Then the senator reached down and turned the door handle.

  He looked back. “Please, my boy, go in,” he said, holding the door and indicating that Sam should precede him.

  The room into which Sam walked was obviously The Library. It had a high, vaulted ceiling from which strategically placed spotlights illuminated half a dozen old masters on the walls. Antique furniture sat atop heart-of-pine flooring and muted Persian carpets. From hidden speakers, a Beethoven trio provided background music. Sam looked around quickly. The big rectangular room was dominated by a stone fireplace with a perfect fire crackling away behind a mesh guard. The fireplace was outlined by an ornate wooden mantel and bordered by a horseshoe-shaped, leather-covered fireplace bumper. A long, kilim-covered sofa accented by a pair of tall black leather wing chairs faced the fireplace. A folded quilt with a bed pillow atop it sat, incongruously, at one end of the sofa. Beyond, in front of the drapery-covered windows, sat a Victorian partner’s desk, with two high-backed leather judge’s chairs opposite each other.

  Sam felt Rand Arthur’s hand on the small of his back, and he stepped farther into the
room. Behind him, something clicked audibly. Sam turned, to see that the inside of the door had the same sort of cipher lock as the outside. Then he looked across to the partner’s desk. Sitting in the big chair facing him was a red-haired woman, half-glasses perched on the tip of her nose, an oversize pen poised three inches above a legal pad. He squinted, and recognized Rand Arthur’s SSCI lawyer lady, Virginia Vacario.

  She removed her glasses and laid them on the desk. The ice of her tone unconcealed, she said, “Hello, Mr. Waterman.”

  At the sound of her voice, the second chair, the one facing away from Sam, swiveled.

  Edward Lee Howard extracted himself from the dark leather. “Well, at last. Cyrus N. PRINGLE. Thank you, Senator.”

  CHAPTER 7

  YOU—TRAITOR. You son of a bitch.” Sam advanced toward Howard. “I’m calling the FBI.”

  “No—” Rand Arthur inserted himself between Sam and the defector. “This man is under my protection. I gave him my word.”

  “Your word means nothing, Senator. Get out of my way.”

  Rand Arthur held his ground. “Let’s get one thing straight,” he said. “Two years ago, I never promised you anything. You called me, Sam. You wanted an appointment. I granted you one. I never pledged confidentiality. If I had, I would have kept my word. And whether you choose to believe it or not, it wasn’t I who leaked the story.”

  Sam remembered things differently. But this wasn’t the time or place to say so. “What’s your point, Senator?”

  “Mr. Howard has asked me for protection. I have granted it to him.”

  “He’s a traitor, Senator. National security trumps politics.”

  “This is about national security, Sam.” Rand Arthur paused. “The information Mr. Howard brought with him is paramount to America’s national security. Isn’t that right, Mr. Howard?”

  Edward Lee Howard said nothing.

  “You asked Michael O’Neill to get hold of Sam Waterman. He’s here.” The senator paced slowly across the rug to Howard’s chair. He nudged the defector’s elbow. “So, tell Sam what you told me.”