The Art of War: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  We began shedding clothes on the way to the bedroom.

  She went to sleep in my arms. I held her, listening to her breathe, and thought about things. About Anna Modin and Tommy Carmellini and spies and nations and all kinds of stuff. I was thinking about the two of us when I drifted off.

  *

  On Willoughby Spit rain beat on the window and wind howled through the half-inch gap between the sill and the sash. Lieutenant Commander Zhang sat in a chair near the window in his room looking out into the darkness of Hampton Roads, watching the lights of a ship move slowly from left to right. She was apparently heading for the mouth of Chesapeake Bay and the open sea beyond. On this stormy night.

  He knew that this curved arm of sand sticking out into the bay, Willoughby Spit, had been formed over the centuries, millennia probably, by the action of the surf and the wind. Grains of sand were moved and dropped, one by one.

  Zhang pulled the blanket around his shoulders and opened his laptop. Automatically he checked the battery. Fully charged. He had downloaded the algorithm, and now he opened the program and looked at it. He would need a few pieces of computer hardware, which he had been told were available in any computer store. Now all he needed was a boat. One with a typical civilian radar.

  He closed the laptop and automatically caressed it. He felt the chill of that early winter wind. The thought that this was probably his last winter occurred to him. Less than four weeks now. Twenty-seven or -eight days, then nothing.

  Zhang didn’t believe in an afterlife. No man knows anything from the time before his birth. We come from nothing and go back to the same state when life is over. Death is not a tragedy, not a disaster, but the natural order of things. After life, rest.

  Unlike all these people in the Norfolk–Hampton Roads area, about a million and a half of them, Zhang was the only one who knew death was coming … twenty-seven or -eight days from now. Oh, we all know we are mortal, but even if we are fatally ill the death moment is unknown. The evil day is somewhere out there in the unpredictable, unknowable, amorphous future, someplace else, when we are older, when life is at low ebb, when our children’s children are adults. Someday … when we are more ready.

  He again felt the chill. Finally he turned out the light beside him and sat in the darkness listening to the rain’s steady beat on the window glass … and the wind.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is, get at him as soon as you can, and keep moving on.

  —Ulysses S. Grant

  The next morning Jake was at work at seven thirty. As usual these days, FBI liaison Zoe Kerry was waiting in the reception area to give him his morning briefing on the investigations of the murders of Tomazic, Reinicke and Maxwell.

  He waved her into the office and asked, as he took off his suit coat and put it on a hanger, “What has the FBI learned since yesterday that I don’t know about?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  Grafton spun to face her. “Bullshit. Either the FBI is stonewalling you or they are incompetent. Which is it?”

  “The priority is the attempted assassination of the president,” Kerry shot back. She was still standing, looking at Grafton from halfway across the room. “We have only so many agents.”

  Grafton walked over to his desk and parked a cheek on the front of it. She found herself looking into those cold gray eyes as he examined her face. The scar on his temple, an old bullet wound, some said, was a reddish hue as he spoke. “The director of the FBI was murdered, gunned down on a street in the nation’s capital, and the FBI isn’t moving heaven and earth to find out who did it? I may be an old country boy, but I am not naïve enough to buy that crock of Pelosi. I want you to go to the Hoover Building this morning and tell your boss to tell Harry Estep that I want to be kept briefed on progress. You know as well as I do that the same people were probably also behind Tomazic’s and Reinicke’s deaths. Crack one and you’ve cracked all three. Tell Harry that I don’t give a shit what he tells the press or the White House, but he’d better keep me informed. Got it?”

  “Yessir.” Her face was frozen.

  “I hope so. I’m sure you’ll have a complete brief for me tomorrow morning. If you don’t, you and I will go to the Hoover Building and we’ll see Harry Estep together.”

  “I understand.”

  “Get going.”

  She wheeled and left.

  *

  I read the latest from across the Atlantic in the International New York Times, which was thrown in front of my door at my hotel, as I ate breakfast in the hotel dining room. After reading the news and all the pieces of the op-ed page, pro and con, I sipped my coffee and gave silent thanks that I was here and not there.

  Anna Modin was here, and that gave the day a glow I hadn’t seen in a long time. Not since I first met her a few years ago. I sighed contentedly and poured another cup of joe from the thermos on the table. It was thick as Mississippi bottomland dirt and just as wet, but I had learned years ago that there wasn’t a decent cup of coffee anywhere east of Boston. If you are going to be a traveling man, you gotta take your caffeine any way you can get it.

  This contented sighing was largely due to the fact that I didn’t expect Anna to hear from Janos Ilin for a while. I was taking Anna to a white-tablecloth, expense-account dinner every evening and staying late at her place. I refused to spend the night and be seen departing in the cold light of morning. As it was, I was disobeying Grafton and putting her at risk: No sense being a fool about it.

  Underneath my bonhomie was the cold hard fact that this romantic interlude would come to an abrupt end in the near future. I had to go back to Washington. I wondered if I could talk Anna into quitting her job and coming along. Wondered if she loved me enough. Wondered if I was important enough to her. Wondered the same things lovers have been wondering since Adam and Eve were evicted from the garden.

  Maybe this evening I would pop the question. Or tomorrow evening. Or the evening after that. I had asked her to marry me before, way back when, and been refused. Could I induce her to change her mind? Or had she already done so and was waiting for me to bring it up?

  Maybe it was just a fantasy. Living together in the good ol’ U.S. of A., home of baseball and the NFL. A little place in the suburbs with a flat-screen TV and cable and a barbecue out back. Because I was a tightwad, spent a lot of time overseas riding the expense account and drove a paid-for, worn-out old car stateside, I had some money saved up, enough for a decent down payment on a house. Plus a job, with a steady income. Private enterprises and corporations come and go, but nothing is steadier than working for Uncle Sugar.

  So I was indulging in what-if reverie when I realized the man helping himself to the muesli on the breakfast bar was as tall and lean as Abe Lincoln. When he turned to pour a little milk into his bowl, I got his profile. Yep. It was Janos Ilin.

  Damn! The bastard must have jumped the first jet from Moscow as soon as someone called him about the message from Anna.

  I sipped on my java and glanced around the room to see who was with him. No one, apparently. He and I were the only guests in the dining room. Probably because it was a few minutes after ten and the honest guests of this fine establishment had gone off to tend to their business appointments or call on their Swiss bankers.

  He sat down at a table against the wall, facing the dining room door, and went to work on his cereal. One of the waiters came from the kitchen with a pot of something hot. Water. Ilin looked through the tea bag selection and chose one. He had a copy of a paper, a local one to judge from the German-language headlines, and he got absorbed in that as the minutes ticked by. He never once looked my way, and I tried to ignore him. He talked to the waiter in German.

  When he finished the tea and I had folded my Times and put it aside, Ilin rose and made his way down the corridor that led to the men’s room. I waited three minutes, then followed him.

  He was standing in the men’s room facing the door. “Mr. Carme
llini,” he said when the door closed behind me.

  “Mr. Ilin.” He didn’t offer to shake hands, so I didn’t.

  “We met once before, a few years ago. You were with Jake Grafton.”

  “I remember.”

  “How is he?”

  “Acting director of the firm. Mean as ever.”

  Something like a trace of a smile crossed his face. “I have something for him. A map.” He produced an envelope from a coat pocket and passed it to me.

  I put it into the breast pocket of my sport coat. “Anything you want me to tell him about this?”

  “It came from one of my agents in China. Waving it around in the wrong quarters could endanger his usefulness, not to mention his life.”

  “I’ll mention his life anyway.”

  I removed the small brown envelopes that contained the dental X-rays from my pocket and handed them over. I explained what they were. “My boss would like to know who these men were and whom they worked for. The attempted assassination of the president has got the Americans hopping mad. Any help you can give will win you a lot of gratitude. My boss said he would take any help or information offered as a personal favor.”

  Ilin put the envelope in his jacket pocket. “I will give all the help I can,” he said. “You will meet a certain man at the corner bar at the Willard Hotel in Washington at noon two weeks from today. You or Jake Grafton. No one else. He will join you and say, ‘A mutual friend was talking about you the other day.’ You will reply, ‘Which friend? I have several.’ If you cannot make the meet, or are followed, keep going back at noon on successive days.”

  “Okay.”

  He turned to the sink and began washing his hands.

  I squared my shoulders and said, “I’m taking Anna back to the States with me.”

  “Oh!” He glanced at me. “Does she want to go?”

  “If she wants to go.”

  He glanced at me with a look of amusement. “Are you asking permission?”

  “No. I’m telling you.” I turned and walked out.

  *

  Zoe Kerry had a report for Jake Grafton when he came to work the day after their confrontation. The three pages took twenty minutes for her to brief. Lots of minutia about all three murders, Maxwell’s, Reinicke’s, and Mario Tomazic’s, and two pages of trivia about the shootdown of the presidential airplane.

  Jake scanned the pages, asked a few questions and said, “There isn’t one significant fact in this puree of trivia.”

  “We’re working on it, sir. Early in an investigation, progress is often a matter of establishing negatives.”

  “You think?”

  “Everyone in the agency wants these killers caught, and we’re moving heaven and earth to make it happen.”

  Grafton sighed. “Every morning I want to see you in here with a report. Tell Harry Estep that I want to see evidence of a conspiracy. Any conspiracy. To commit any crime. From jaywalking to murder to stealing books from the Library of Congress. Anything. And I want any evidence any of your agents can find pointing to the identity of the killer of Mario Tomazic, the director of this agency.”

  “I don’t think you are in our chain of command, sir.”

  Jake Grafton smiled. Perhaps. At least his teeth showed and his eyes turned cold. “I don’t want to get into a pissing match with the FBI, and Harry Estep doesn’t want to get in a pissing match with this agency. Discuss this conversation with him. I’m sure he will agree. I need to see evidence of a conspiracy, if there is one, so this agency can do the job for which it was created. And if the person or persons who killed Tomazic came from this agency, or from overseas, I need to know that so I can do my job. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tomorrow morning, Kerry.”

  She left, and Harley Merritt came in carrying his coffee cup and a file filled with things he wanted Grafton’s opinion on. They got back to the serious business of global intelligence.

  *

  When Anna came home from work, I was sitting in the darkness waiting. “Oh, Tommy,” she said, and dropped her coat and opened her arms. She gave me a great hug. Oh, man …

  I already had a bottle of her favorite wine open and a glass poured. When she finally released me, I got her seated in her little living room and handed the wine to her.

  “I saw Ilin today,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, surprise in her voice. “I had no message.”

  “He walked into my hotel dining room a few minutes after ten o’clock. We had a little conversation in the men’s room.”

  “So you’re going back to America?” she said. I tried to wring a clue from her voice and the way she said it, but couldn’t.

  “Soon,” I said with nothing behind it. “I was thinking … Well, Anna, I was hoping you would come with me.”

  She stared. Completely forgot the wineglass in her hand and stared into my eyes. I stared right back.

  “Will you?” I asked.

  “Is this a marriage proposal?”

  “I tried that once and it didn’t work. I’m lowering the barrier. If I can get you over this little fence, get you to America, get you to see how great life would be with us together, then I’ll try another proposal. See, I’ve thought this out.”

  She smiled at me. “I’ve been thinking, too,” she said.

  “If you have a Swiss passport you don’t need a visa to get into the States. Do you have one?”

  She nodded. Yes.

  “Soooo…” I tried to contain myself. I reached for her hands. We were already knee to knee.

  “Oh, Tommy. I—”

  “Come on, kiddo. This is the best offer you’re going to get today. Let’s get on with life. Let’s worry about Anna and Tommy. Nobody else.”

  She didn’t say anything. The thought that perhaps I was pressing too hard occurred to me. “What have you been thinking?” I asked.

  “That I was a fool not to say yes the first time you asked me.”

  That did it. She started laughing and crying at the same time and I started laughing and crying and we went on up into the stratosphere from there.

  *

  We managed to get on a plane to Washington, via London, the following morning. I used my Harold W. Cass credit card to buy both tickets. If the Company bean counters didn’t like it, they could rat me out to Grafton and he could fire me.

  Anna called her office from the airport and told them she was resigning. We checked our bags, went through security and walked the concourse holding hands. As we flew across Europe we talked about the future, not the past. I was pretty sure there wasn’t much more of the CIA in mine. I was tired of going overseas for weeks, or months, often to places no sane person would even want to visit. Tired of pretending to be something and someone I’m not.

  I had a law degree. Maybe I could go back to California and take the bar exam. What I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to stay in the Washington, DC, area. I had been there for enough years to know I didn’t like it. California! Yeah.

  Changing planes in London, we had an hour to kill after we got to our gate. We walked into a bookstore/newsstand and I bought some newspapers. One of the stories at the bottom of the front page of The Wall Street Journal caught my eye. Homeland Security had been ordered by the White House to step up inspections on people leaving and entering the United States. Entering? The Journal predicted long lines for travelers. No kidding!

  I stood there thinking about the envelope that Ilin had given me, which was in the breast pocket of my jacket. What if they found that? Confiscated it? Wanted an explanation? I was traveling as Harold W. Cass, Hoosier extraordinaire, with a fake passport issued by the U.S. State Department and a fake driver’s license and AAA card, all issued by the documents section of the agency. What if customs got curious about the map? The computer should let my passport slide on through, but this map … I hadn’t looked at it, but obviously Ilin had gone to a great deal of trouble getting it to me and thought it would mean somet
hing to Grafton if I could deliver it.

  “Wait at the gate a moment,” I told Anna, and went back along the concourse toward a Royal Mail storefront I had noticed walking up. It was about twice the size of a telephone booth. The gray-haired lady in uniform behind the counter had envelopes and stamps. I bought an envelope, stuck Ilin’s envelope inside, and addressed it to Willie Varner at the lock shop. Bought enough stamps with my CIA credit card to get it all the way across the Atlantic, affixed them and dropped the envelope in the slot.

  Feeling somewhat relieved, I strolled back to Anna, who was waiting at the gate. She smiled at me as I walked up and reached for my hand. A huge grin spread across my face. Life was looking up.

  It was afternoon when we landed at Dulles Airport in the western suburbs of Washington. We got through immigration easily enough after the usual wait, me through the U.S. citizens line and Anna through the foreigners section, and found our baggage at the carousel.

  The line to get through customs was severely backed up. From where I stood, I could see the inspectors pawing though luggage. Beyond the inspectors, against the wall, were armed Homeland Security officers in uniform, scanning the crowd. They didn’t look bored. Which bothered me. The whole scene reminded me of my last trip through the Moscow airport. Guilty until proven innocent.

  “Get in another line,” I whispered to Anna. “If we get separated, meet me at Grafton’s in Roslyn. You remember the address?”

  She nodded. She was a professional. She had committed that address to memory years ago, when she was sent by Ilin to see Grafton. She glanced at me just once and went, no questions asked, pushing her cart with her suitcase and carry-on.

  It took an hour for me to get to the head of the line. I surrendered my customs form, which said I had not bought anything abroad and had nothing to declare. Then I dumped my stuff on the conveyor belt and watched them x-ray both items.

  The fun began when the stuff came out of the X-ray machine on the belt. An inspector there had my customs form in hand. He gestured at the bag and carry-on. “Open them up.” He pointed to a nearby table. I carried the bags over and tossed them up.