“You’re right, he would. This is over my head. Next question is why? Why did whoever is behind this need to rub out Al Jackson and Neil Bernstein? Blowing Archie away, I can understand. There must be dozens of people who had a motive to kill him. Or even if the boss ordered the hit on Archie, I would understand. I wouldn’t like it, but I’d understand. But why the others and why you?”
“You said it, Charlie. Something must have happened on one of Archie’s debacles. What you need to do, if you can, is pull reports on all of them that also included the three of us. There can’t have been that many. In fact, I don’t recall but one, wait…two…I don’t know, not many. Dig them out, Charlie, and find out what makes the people involved in them a potential liability to someone. That someone will be your man.”
“Okay, it will mean going in to the office and that may be the end of my road.”
“Can you access the records remotely?”
“Not me. As far as I know, no one can.”
“Do you remember Sam Ryder? I think she’s married now. She used to work for me in Picketsville and is now at NSA?”
“Tall red head with the big…overbite? Yeah. I remember her.”
“If push gets to shove, call her. I’ll give you her home number. Tell her it’s for me. Tell her about the target on my back, and then tell her what you need. She’ll get the files if anyone can.”
“You want to hack into the CIA?”
“It’s that or you go in and sneak the files out yourself.”
“I’ll try that first. There are more ways in and out of that building than most people know. If I must, I can slip in and out without the director knowing—at least for twenty minutes or so. That should be enough time to suborn a file clerk or two. What will you do?”
“Figure on being the bait, I guess. Only I will be the one setting the trap, not the director.”
“We’re assuming that is what he’s up to.”
“I have no other choice, Charlie. If these guys found Archie, Al, and probably Neil, they have access and assets. They are good, and they will find me, too. That being the case, what other choice do I have?”
“You could come in. We’d protect you.”
“Listen to yourself, Charlie. You have to sneak into the building or perhaps hack into the records, and you think I should come in?”
“I’m thinking of Ruth, Ike.”
“Thanks for that. But for the same reasons, I’d much rather trust Ruth to the Picketsville sheriff’s office. Besides, if I’m right, the director would turn around and toss me under the bus somewhere else. He’s after something big and you and I are expendable. With regret, of course. I don’t have a plan yet, Charlie. As I said, I need time to think this through.”
“And then what?”
“Then I will set my trap, and either I will get them or they will get me. One way or the other, it will be over.”
“I don’t like this, Ike. Come in.”
“Bad juju there, Charlie. In the meantime, you should go to work, make nice with the director and try to figure out what’s in those files that has everybody acting weird and pretend all is well in heaven and earth and so on.”
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Be very careful, Ike, before you do anything that can’t be undone.”
“Thank you for that, O Prince of Denmark. I’ll be careful. Tell you what. We need to talk some more. Do your thing at the Company and then go have lunch where we celebrated my engagement to Eloise. You remember?”
“A long time ago. Yes, I remember.”
Ike closed the connection and stared out to sea. When she found out, Ruth was going to be really pissed, apoplectic more like. Well, it couldn’t be helped, and at least they hadn’t gone with Plan B. Las Vegas was no place to attempt a double-cross to trap a killer.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The view from the director’s office window was shared with only a select few. Indeed, the location of his office and therefore the view would not be something one would find on a tourist map, were there one to be had, which, of course, there wasn’t. In an age of ridiculously easy access to illicit arms purchases—everything from hand grenades to shoulder-held rocket launchers—putting a crosshair on a particular window, however protected from the exterior, was deemed a bad idea. As it happened the window out of which he now gazed included a clear view of the parking lot that had an assigned space for Charles Garland. His assistant waited until he turned his attention back to the room.
“This is very odd, Director. Once he powered up his cell phone, we were able to establish that Garland was on his way here. Then, he received a phone call which lasted something like five seconds and he high-tailed it back across the Potomac. What’s going on?”
“Who knows? Best guess? Ike Schwartz contacted him. It would be nice to know why. Okay, something has gone south. I suppose it would be asking too much for the call to have been traced?”
“Sorry sir, there wasn’t enough time. We couldn’t even capture the caller’s number. We’ve kept the tracker on in case he calls again but so far, nothing.”
“You won’t get anything more. Not anytime soon. Garland is no dummy. Five seconds and he hangs up? What does that tell you?”
“He knew we’re locked on to his phone.”
“Exactly. You can bet that if there is to be any more chat, it will be on safe phones.”
“What if Garland comes in? I mean, he can’t stay away forever.”
The director turned and refocused his gaze on Charlie Garland’s parking. “Oh, you can bet a week’s pay he’ll be in, innocent as a baby, all smiles and cooperation and leaving no tracks in the sand, I promise you. We’ve lost our edge, Mark. We’ll have to try something else. Pull the surveillance on his apartment.”
“Sir?”
“New ball game, son. Charlie’s on to us, and for some reason, it looks like Schwartz is or soon will be in the game but on his own terms. I don’t know how that happened. Sometimes that guy is positively uncanny. Either way, unless I’m really off base, we will be playing this one by Ike Schwartz’s rules. Let’s hope he can pull it off.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Then we go back to the proverbial drawing board. We need to put a lid on this business and pronto. The Senate confirmation that could blow up in the President’s face could happen as early as next week.”
***
Ike returned to the big house and did a quick inventory of Archie Whitlock’s duffel bag. It appeared the old man had emptied out one of his caches. Every field agent—well many of them—had small collections of arms, passports, cash, and credit cards, and false IDs tucked away in the event he or she needed disappear for a short while—or forever. Where Conan Doyle’s characters had bolt holes, wary spies had duffels and lock boxes filled with necessities. It appeared Archie had brought one such to Scone Island with him. Why? What was he up to? Ike knew he’d need to figure that out, but it would have to be later.
He laid the items out on the piano lid. There was enough equipment in the bag to mount a small war. Very convenient. It would make what he had to do a lot easier. But first he had to talk to Ruth, get her off the island and back home or out of sight. Then he’d need to call the office and set up an around-the-clock watch on her. Nearer at hand, he’d need to recruit the Gott brothers, Henry Potter, and finally get a message to Stone and his boss over on the Mainland. Stone first. He’d need some serious help and felt sure he couldn’t count on any coming from the agency, although he was sure they’d show up afterwards to tidy up.
He spent the next twenty minutes pacing through the big house, checking the rooms on each floor. There were good lines of fire from most of the windows. He remembered from his trip to the cliff’s edge where Archie took his nose dive into eternity that the east cliff face had crude stone steps cut into it that led to the narrow beach and the remains of a long washed-away pier. The path from that point was clearly visible from the
east windows. Would they come that way? If so they would have to come in on the ebb tide, the only time the beach would be sufficiently wide enough to allow a shore party to land without risking their boat’s bottom on the rocks. More likely they’d arrive as summer renters or drop by sailors. The Bite must be a popular stopover for locals cruising up and down the coast. One boat more or less in the harbor would not attract any attention. Maybe this early in the season it might, but he couldn’t be sure of that and there would be no way he could check on them if they did anchor. But Stone could, and he guessed Henry Potter didn’t miss much.
With its limited access and closed society, there were clear advantages to making a stand here on the island, but even on the best of days, operations like this one more nearly resembled Swiss cheese than cheddar. The trick would be to cover all the possibilities with a single answer so that no matter how and when his stalkers arrived, he would be covered. Easier said than done.
It was time to face Ruth.
***
Charlie made his way back to Fairfax and then CIA headquarters. He would keep his phone off until he finished what he had to do in the building. Only when he’d finished what needed to be done, would he make his presence known. First, he had to check out some files. He entered the building through one of the “back doors” he’d mentioned to Ike—he hoped without attracting any attention. He managed to work his way to the records morgue and pull all the files that met the criteria he’d established. They had to be ops which included at least two of the three men either dead or at risk. After he’d copied several onto a thumb drive, he exited, circled around, and reentered the building, this time with his phone on, and making a conspicuous stop at Reception to swipe his ID card and have his image recorded on the surveillance camera. As he told Ike, there were ways into the building that did not necessarily require this last ritual if you knew them and were willing to run the risk of being challenged or at the very least reprimanded. Shot by a conscientious guard could be the worst case. That had happened only twice during his tenure.
He went quickly to his office and waited. He guessed the director would stew a while before he called. He made a duplicate thumb drive by copying the files from the morgue. He’d need something for them to confiscate if they guessed what he’d done. While he waited he skimmed through the files. There had to be something in one of them that was the clue to why Ike and the others were being hunted. And if the director or his aide had been monitoring the parking lot, there would be. Meanwhile he would need to work on his story.
The director did, in fact, wait ten minutes before summoning Charlie to his office.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Ruth was furious. Ike listened without comment while she stumped around the room aiming her invective first at the CIA, then Charlie, the Republican Party, politicians in general, Wall Street, and finally Ike for being a damned Boy Scout. Why did he have to stick his fork into every idiotic dish that Charlie Garland put on their table? And what was the big idea of having a phone and not telling her about it?
Ike let her vent while he poured them each a stiff whiskey. He had enough ice to cool but not seriously dilute the alcohol. That would be important when Ruth finally ran out of targets and energy and sat down to listen. He needed to explain the predicament they were in, and soon, because he had a long list of things that needed doing before he called Charlie back. Not the least of these involved getting Ruth off the island and safely back to Picketsville without attracting the attention of the goons were who were after him. And then there was the problem of her mother, wherever she’d disappeared to.
Finally, Ruth’s ranting shuddered to a halt. Ike handed her the drink and explained in detail what had happened, that it had nothing to do with Charlie and his bad habit of involving Ike in his problems, that the situation was, as nearly as anyone could tell, historical and, given the director’s odd behavior, serious. And, by the way, the phone was not his, but one he’d found at Cliffside and whose owner happened to be the source of the mess they were in.
“But why, Ike? Why did you call Charlie in the first place?”
“It goes with the tent.”
“It goes with the tent? What the hell does that mean, it goes with the tent?”
“My previous employment has rendered me permanently bent out of shape, irretrievably twisted by too many years playing secret agent in too many covert operations. You push the button that puts me in spook mode and everything else follows instinctively—like buying the tent. Look, something seemed noticeably out of whack over at Cliffside. What kind of a sixty-year-old man drops his assailant with a classic leg sweep? I mean who can do that at age sixty? You have to wonder. So, I went back over there, as I promised, to look for the various studies I talked about—hydrological and so on. While I was rooting around looking for them, I found the phone with a bunch of other stuff.”
“Other stuff? What kind of other stuff?”
“A cache of weapons for starters and ID cards, money…At that point, I knew the set-up had more to do with my past than I cared to think. The only people I know of who travel with that kind of baggage are either bad guys or the people who work with Charlie. So, I thought I’d better ask before something happened that I couldn’t control.”
“Why would you have to be in control?”
“You miss my point. The piano was stuffed with enough lethal junk to give Davey Crockett the means to win the battle at the Alamo. That is not something you can overlook.”
“But why Charlie? Why not call the kid cop, Deputy Stone? It’s his jurisdiction, his problem.”
“I might have done except I felt certain that bag of goodies belonged to an agent, current or past. Charlie needed to know that one of his people was here and had become a victim or killer. Either way, something bad went down here. What I didn’t expect to hear, that the dead guy was Archie Whitlock and that his murder was not the only one in the last several days, that the killings might be connected, or that there might be one more in the offing.”
“One more? Who?”
“Me.”
***
Charlie Garland would never make anyone’s best-dressed list. His friends said he looked like he’d been dragged backward through a keyhole. A more generous description was that he looked like an unmade bed. Some thought it was an affectation, a ploy used to make him blend in, to seem unimportant. In fact, his general mien and dress did produce that effect and played significantly in his success as the de facto internal affairs officer for the CIA. That, incidentally, was not his title, nor did he have one. The in-house phone book listed him as a public relations specialist and sometimes he even showed up in that part of the building which housed people given that task. This usually happened when he needed a favor, not when he was engaged in his job.
Part of Charlie’s rumpledness, whether contrived or real, consisted of cuffed trousers. He may have been the only male in the DC area under sixty-five to have cuffs in his trousers. He occasionally found them useful, as he did this time when he received his summons to the director’s office. One copy of the files he’d downloaded before making his very public entrance into the building went into his right pants cuff. He patted it as flat as he could and put the drive in his jacket pocket. He took the elevator up from the basement where his office with its battered desk and steel filing cabinet were located.
The director waited with an aide. Charlie knew the aide only slightly and only by his first name, Mark. Their previous encounters had not been positive. He nodded to the two men and waited. They could start.
The director stood staring out of his window. “Garland,” he said without turning around, “you took a long time getting from that car of yours to your office.”
“Pit stop, Director.”
“It’s a prostate problem then?”
“Very possibly. And I need to say hello to one of the women in finance. It’s her birthday.”
“Who would that be?”
“Name slips my mind. Y
oung pretty girl, blonde and new. Wears her hair in a ponytail.”
“That could be any of a hundred or more women in this building.”
“Yes, I suppose it could.”
“You knew it was this girl’s birthday, what she looked like and you can’t remember her name. Have I got that right?”
“On the money.”
“How is that possible?”
“Might it have something to do with the prostate?”
“Okay, enough fun and games. Where were you from the moment you left that pile of junk you drive to when you appeared on station?”
“As I said—”
“I said no more games. Empty your pockets. Mark, pat him down. Unless I miss my guess, our friend here has been wishing his birthday greetings in the file morgue. And that lady is neither young, nor pretty and wears her hair in a bun, not a ponytail.”
Charlie laid the contents of his pockets on the director’s desk and allowed Mark to pat him down. If you don’t know cuffs, you don’t look for cuffs. Mark didn’t on both counts.
“Nothing here, sir.”
“Then whatever he lifted must still be in his office. Send someone down and confiscate every memory stick he’s got. Charlie, as of this moment you are off-duty. Tell me a reason why I shouldn’t furlough you.”
“Can’t think of any. How about this, since I couldn’t find your leak inside, even if I wanted to, how about I try to find out what happened to Bernstein.”
“We found the leak. You’re off that task.”
“Really, who?”
“Cora Dinwiddie, aka Cora Sharpe Whitlock.”
“One of Archie’s ex-wives?”
“Exactly. The Las Vegas police have her body in their morgue. The best guess is she met up with and told, possibly sold, Archie’s location to his killer. How she knew it, I can’t imagine. But knowing Archie, he may have gotten lonely and looked her up. Who knows? Okay, go find out what happened to Bernstein.”
“That would put me in Barratt, Colorado, right?”
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