Jack in the Box

by John Weisman

  Which is why Sam stood in the senator’s huge kitchen wobbling precariously on an operational high wire. He understood that Rand Arthur’s political ambition was pushing him toward imprudence—and disaster. And Virginia Vacario was doing nothing to rein the senator in. Hell, Sam thought, he’s probably promised to make her the first female director of central intelligence.

  He had to make them perform by his book, not theirs. The point was, Edward Lee Howard was a Moscow walk-in—and Moscow walk-ins more often than not were provocateurs. Moreover, Sam’s quarter-century-plus of street smarts had given him a certain advantage in spots like this. It wasn’t the first time he’d been squeezed by impatient superiors, or agents who wanted him to rush to judgment so they could get paid—or extracted. And taking control as unlikely as it might appear on the surface, wasn’t going to be all that difficult.

  Sam, after all, understood what made Rand Arthur tick. He was aware of the senator’s intentions—even if all his motives were still unclear. And he had a pretty good idea about Rand Arthur’s vulnerabilities, too. Like most politicians (and Sam had recruited his fair share), Rand Arthur would be receptive to flattery and praise. He’d be susceptible to the sort of subtle ego stroking that demonstrated just how important, influential, and all-powerful he was. And Rand Arthur’s worst fear? It would be public humiliation. The thing all politicians fear most is loss of face, followed by loss of votes.

  So, he had to reel Rand Arthur in. Sam cast his fly into the water by placing both his hands on the dark polished granite as if resting them on a lectern. “Senator,” he said in his most deferential tone, “you were right and I was wrong. We have to act—and act decisively.” He watched as Rand Arthur’s face brightened.

  The senator said, “I’m gratified, my boy.”

  Sam worked the fly along the surface by rapping his knuckles on the cool stone. “Okay, then. Let’s look at the situation tactically.” He inclined his head in Virginia Vacario’s direction. “Let’s assume he is genuine. The Russians are definitely going to come after Howard. They’re going to try to cover their tracks; destroy anything that might hurt them—and that includes the guy down the hall. You’re both right. Time is of the essence.”

  Rand Arthur said, “My sentiments precisely.”

  “So, we must take the initiative. Remember what they taught us before we left for Vietnam, Senator? If you’re ambushed, you initiate a counterambush with such ferocity and violence of action that the ambushers are forced to retreat.”

  “That’s right,” Rand Arthur said.

  Sam continued. “I say we initiate from the get-go, Senator—we take the offensive.”

  Rand Arthur’s satisfied expression told Sam that the fly had been taken. Now it was time to set the hook. Sam paused, then said: “Senator, so far as I’m concerned, there’s only one aspect of this situation that might leave you politically vulnerable.”

  Rand Arthur’s sunny expression clouded over. “Politically vulnerable,” he repeated.

  “Oh, yes,” Sam said as neutrally as he could. “But it’s only a small thing, and I believe we can deal with it on the run.” He looked straight into Rand Arthur’s eyes and said, “So, Senator, how do you suggest we proceed?”

  “I don’t like problems, Sam,” Rand Arthur growled. “And I certainly don’t like surprises.”

  “No one does, Senator.”

  Rand Arthur’s tone chilled another ten degrees. “I’m not in the mood for games, Sam. What’s the problem?”

  “He’s a walk-in,” Sam said.

  “So?”

  “Obviously you brought me into this because of my experience. Here’s the most basic fact about walk-ins: unless they’ve brought documents to establish their bona fides, you don’t know anything about their motivation.”

  Rand Arthur looked back at him but said nothing.

  “That’s why we’re taught to treat walk-ins differently. We look very carefully at their motives, and we always demand something concrete that will establish their bona fides.”

  “Well—” the senator began.

  Sam cut him off. “Think about it, Senator. What do you really know about Ed Howard’s motives? And more to the point, what did he bring you?”

  Rand Arthur stroked his chin. He started to open his mouth, but Sam cut him off again. “Senator, every single American who betrayed our country in recent years was a walk-in. Ames, Walker, Nicholson, Hanssen—all contacted the KGB, not the other way around. And each one of them gave the Russians classified materials to establish their bona fides. Ed Howard followed the same pattern. When Howard defected he took three hundred pages of CIA documents to Lubyanka, including one of our crown jewels: the denied area operations course syllabus. We had to invent a whole new way to work in Moscow because of him.”

  The senator’s expression reflected his impatience. “So?”

  “Senator, what did Howard bring when he showed up on your doorstep?”

  “He told me—”

  Now it was Sam’s tone that grew cold. “What a walk-in says doesn’t matter, Senator. I’m no politician,” Sam said. “But let’s look at this situation as if it was a headline in the Washington Post. ‘Senator Claims President Knew About 9/11 on Say-So of Defector Who Murdered American Intelligence Assets.’ ”

  Rand Arthur’s head bobbed up and down twice. “I see your point,” he said, his tone grave. “Well, my boy,” he said, ready for the creel, “how do you think we should handle this—given the time limitations, of course.”

  It was at that point, just as Sam was congratulating himself, that he happened to catch Virginia Vacario in his peripheral vision. Her expression, absolutely kaleidoscopic, refracted awareness, comprehension, bemusement, skepticism, and incredulity, all in the space of about half a second. And then her lawyerly instincts overrode whatever else she might have been thinking and her face turned impassive, unreadable, deadpan.

  Sam picked up Rand Arthur’s train of thought. “I think I should handle him the way I normally handle walk-ins, Senator.”

  Rand Arthur looked intently at Sam. “Which is?”

  “Interrogate him for hours. Polygraph him. Make him repeat his story over and over to pick up any inconsistencies.”

  “But—”

  “I know we don’t have the time to do all that. So we’re going to have to cut to the chase. You have to make Howard turn over his documentation, or threaten him with the FBI.”

  Rand Arthur turned toward his general counsel. “What do you think, Ginny?”

  “I think Mr. Waterman is right, Senator.”

  Rand Arthur pursed his lips. Finally, he said, “Agreed.” He pulled at the cuffs of his jacket and started toward the pantry door.

  With the senator leading the way, the trio retraced their path. Rand Arthur punched the combination into the cipher lock and opened the door, stepping aside so that Sam and Virginia Vacario could precede him.

  Sam crossed the threshold. There was a draft in the room.

  That was because the thick drapes behind the desk were parted. Behind them, the Palladian window was open—and Ed Howard had vanished.

  It didn’t take Sam more than a few seconds to realize what Howard had done—because he’d left the evidence behind for them to find. The defector had used the senator’s sterling-silver letter opener and a large, straightened paper clip to pick the cheap, keyed hardware-store lock on the window. It was par for the course when it came to such matters, Sam thought somewhat ruefully. He’d seen it before, during his overseas tours: penny-wise Soviet ambassadors who installed two-thousand-ruble KGB-approved cipher locks on the doors because Moscow paid for them, and one-ruble, seventy-nine-kopek tin Romanian locks on the windows, because window locks came out of the embassy budget.

  That sort of approach to security had made his life a lot easier when he’d been working the streets. But it complicated the hell out of the current situation.

  At least, Sam thought, no one panicked—outwardly. The senator called for a quick
search of the grounds and the woods, but to no avail. Well, that was to be expected: the cops were city boys who’d sat cold and uncomfortable inside their Crown Vic cocoons. They were dressed in suits and tasseled loafers, but even if they’d been wearing BDUs and boon-dockers they’d still have no idea how to comb the thirty acres of bramble-and-thorn-covered hillside behind the house, or the two hundred acres of dense woods to the south and east.

  Moreover, given the circumstances, there was no way the senator could even put out a proper APB. Why? Because Rand Arthur couldn’t tell anyone, including his precious U.S. Capitol police and, more significantly, the FBI or any other state or federal law enforcement agency, precisely for whom he was looking, and why.

  Which was when Sam realized how carefully Ed Howard had planned his arrival—and factored in an abrupt departure. The defector had obviously surveilled Rand Arthur’s estate, located a caching spot for a car, and identified an escape route—all before he’d made his presence known.

  THEY WERE SITTING in the library, Rand Arthur scowling frostily in Sam’s direction. The senator hadn’t said anything, but Sam understood he was being blamed for Howard’s disappearance. It was Sam, after all, who’d caused Howard to be left alone.

  Sam stared the senator down until Rand finally shifted his gaze. It wasn’t his fault—Howard’s move had been part of an elaborate scenario. Of course the senator didn’t see things that way. That was to be expected: Rand Arthur was the center of his own universe. Everything was about him.

  Well, it was time to open his eyes to the real world. “Senator,” Sam said, “you told me Howard ‘just showed up'—your words, Senator—at your front door two days ago.”

  “Correct,” Rand Arthur said. “He rang the doorbell. I came downstairs and answered it.” The senator was nursing a large crystal tumbler of single malt in which floated one lonely ice cube. “I recognized him at once, of course, from surveillance photos I’d seen during closed hearings. Sam, you could have knocked me over with a feather.”

  Sam had refused whiskey. He wanted his mind uncluttered. “How’d he get here?”

  The senator pondered the question for some seconds, and then said, his head wagging, “I don’t know—I never even thought about it.” He sipped his drink. “And now that you ask, I don’t remember seeing a car. Frankly, I was so excited to see him, it never occurred to me to look.”

  That was when Sam knew precisely how it had gone down, as they said on all those TV cop shows he’d been watching on cable lately. Sam knew, because it was exactly what he would have done if he’d been in Ed Howard’s shoes. Howard was a professional. Just like Sam, he’d understand exactly what sort of emotional response his appearance would trigger in a politician like Rand Arthur. There would be shock, surprise, astonishment, and disbelief to name a few of the immediate reactions, all accompanied by a tsunami-size adrenaline surge. Which would, in turn, knock out Rand Arthur’s ability to act rationally—like, for example, to peer out into the driveway for a car and take down the license plate.

  Ed Howard’s performance reinforced Sam’s belief that the redefection had been part of a carefully scripted CA—covert action—operation. But who had written the script? And what was the ultimate goal? Those were the million-dollar questions. Because the outcome of covert action was never obvious. Like the plot of that old movie, The Sting, the goal of a successful covert action was to nick the target without that target—or anyone else—knowing they’d been had. Like the way CIA had supported the Polish trade union Solidarity in the 1970s and 1980s. One of Sam’s jobs in Warsaw had been the clandestine dispensing of millions of Solidarity buttons, posters, broadsides, and leaflets through a series of Polish agent networks who were convinced the support was coming from European trade unions. It wasn’t: the materials had been printed by CIA to assist Lech Walesa’s struggling organization when it was broke and under attack from Poland’s Communist government. CIA’s CA program kept Solidarity alive—and neither the Communists nor Walesa had ever known.

  Right then, all Sam knew for certain was that Rand Arthur had been the target of a covert action. Or had he? Certainly, had the defector’s charges been allowed to go forward, the entire government, from the White House on down, would have been thrown into chaos. So, Howard might have been running an op designed by Moscow Center to cause what was left of the United States’s counterintelligence apparatus further turmoil. Or, he might have been initiating a sleight-of-hand strategy to deflect attention from an audacious, large-scale Russian destabilization program. It could be anything.

  The senator finally looked away from his scotch. “I don’t suppose there’s any way we can assess his information now, Sam.” He peered at Sam, who saw, ever so fleetingly, the wide-eyed, feckless, optimistic features of a six-year-old staring at a shattered toy, hoping daddy can somehow make it all right. Then the image passed; the professional politician’s face reappeared. “Are you listening, Sam? There’s got to be some way I can still use what he told us.”

  “Senator, it’s over. He’s pulled a Yurchenko.” Vitali Yurchenko was a KGB security officer who’d defected almost twenty years before, in August 1985. He’d walked into AMEMBASSY Rome, identified himself as a KGB colonel, and demanded to speak to Alan Wolfe, who was Rome’s chief at the time. Flown to Washington under tight security, he’d pointed his CIA debriefers at NSA analyst Ronald Pelton, and a fired CIA case officer trainee named Edward Lee Howard who lived in New Mexico but had made two trips to Vienna in the past eight months. Yurchenko claimed that Howard had met with KGB case officers.

  The Romanoffs were euphoric. A high-level defection like Yurchenko’s would cement their ascendancy—perhaps even cause Bill Casey’s downfall. So they kept Yurchenko isolated from Langley’s Counterintelligence Division, which was still under the control of Brahmins. And when the Brahmins complained, the Romanoffs leaked the story that CI was trying to wage a turf war so it could augment its already bloated budget.

  Undeterred by Ed Howard’s September 1985 defection, the Romanoffs flaunted their defector’s revelations within the community and leaked hints of what he said to their favorite reporters. In fact, they flaunted “their guy” Yurchenko and the “crown jewels” he’d brought with him all over town, right up to the chilly November night, three and a half months later, when, during a dinner at a Georgetown bistro, Vitali Yurchenko excused himself to go to the men’s room, escaped from his Romanoff handlers by slipping out the kitchen door, walked up Wisconsin Avenue and straight through the gates of the Soviet embassy. At a press conference the next day he claimed he’d been kidnapped by CIA.

  Rand Arthur’s chest deflated. “A Yurchenko,” he sighed. “But still, Sam …”

  It was time to put a stop to this nonsense. “Senator,” Sam said, “you’ve been had.”

  Rand Arthur bit his lips and set down his drink. “Of course, if you hadn’t been here, Howard wouldn’t have gotten spooked,” the senator said bitterly.

  Then he caught the dangerous look in Sam’s eyes and instinctively threw up his hands. “No, no—that’s wrong. That’s wrong—I apologize. I do. Ed Howard demanded to see you. It was his idea. I’m glad I sent for you. Glad, Sam, glad. If I hadn’t, and it turned out he was peddling a story …” The senator retrieved his glass and took a long, regretful pull on his single malt. “Still …” Rand Arthur’s voice trailed off. “Just think of the possibilities.”

  Possibilities were exactly what Sam was thinking about—although they were homicidal in nature. Finally, he calmed himself down and stared at Rand Arthur in the same detached way he used to deal with his developmentals. “Didn’t he say he gave you his passport?”

  The senator set his drink down. “Yes—it’s in my safe.”

  “May I see it?”

  “Certainly, my boy.” The senator rose, and crossed the room, to where an arrangement of three small nineteenth-century hunting-dog oils clustered around a large pastoral scene framed in ornate gilt wood. He swung the large painting to his left�
�the frame was obviously on hinges—revealing beneath it a small green safe door with an electronic lock. He punched the combination, turned the handle, opened the foot-square door, reached inside, and extracted a dog-eared, burgundy-covered booklet, which he handed to Sam.

  Sam ran his thumb over the faded gold leaf harp embossed on the cover then opened the document. “Seamus Haitch Maloney of Ballyragget,” he pronounced in a cartoonish Irish accent. “Born twenty-five February 1955. The ‘haitch,’ incidentally, is for Harold.” He thumbed through the well-worn pages until he came to a Lufthansa seat stub, Frankfurt-Dulles, dated October 10, for seat 23D, stuffed between two pages near the back of the passport.

  Sam blinked. He riffled through the pages again. There was a passport control stamp from Frankfurt/Main, dated 10.10.02. But no INS stamp. Which told Sam Howard hadn’t used the Maloney document to enter the country. This was 2002, after all. The nation was at war. And even the hugely inept INS managed to stamp the passports of foreign nationals when they arrived at a major U.S. airport in these days of heightened security.

  He peered down at the seat stub without disturbing it. October 10. Seat 23D. Twenty-three. That was today. Sam’s birthday—and the date of his final meeting with Pavel Baranov. Seat D. Long-short-short in Morse code. That was the call-out sign Pavel Baranov had used to signal Sam. October 10. The same date that was on the document Pavel Baranov showed him in Moscow. It was a message. It had to be. There are no coincidences.

  Sam closed the passport, then opened it again and flipped through the pages, looking a second time for an INS stamp. There was none. Still, he kept the pages moving so as not to call attention to himself—or the significance of what he’d discovered. Even so, his pulse beat so loud in his ears they had to hear it.