“I still don’t understand why you left Ike swinging in the breeze,” Ruth said. “He doesn’t have anything to do with you people, at least not anymore.”
“In the first place, we didn’t know where Ike was, because the two of you decided to play hide-and-seek and Ike is very good at the hiding part. If we’d known where you were sooner this might have played out differently.”
“Really? The way I see it, it’s a good thing Ike was successful at being invisible.” More color had returned to Ruth’s cheeks, whether as result of her rising anger, the cocoa, or the earlier shot of bourbon wasn’t clear.
“You will have to trust me on this.”
“Yeah, yeah. People sell ponzi schemes with that line, Mr. Director.”
Chapter Forty-nine
The director of the CIA did not ordinarily feel a need to explain himself to anyone, except the President and occasionally the Senate committee charged with the oversight of his budget and therefore his operation. He took a breath and gathered what little patience he had remaining.
“Ms. Harris, please, just listen for a minute and then you can raise hell with me. Charlie can tell you the connection. I’d like to think we would have eventually found it in-house ourselves but Charlie or Charlie’s hacker turned it up first.”
“And found it in spite of his being sent off to the middle of nowhere like a naughty school boy, I gather.” Ruth was not ready to be mollified. “So, Charlie, what did you find?”
“While I twiddled my thumbs and brought down a corrupt police department in Colorado—that’s another story for another day—I had time to think. We’d agreed it had to have something to do with one of the missions Ike and Archie did with Bernstein and Jackson. There were three of them, as you know—four, if you count the training thing. Nothing was forthcoming from the director and—”
“The pressure was on me to wrap the due diligence on Osborn,” the director interrupted. “Then, Ike and Garland have a relationship that I believed would compromise anything we might try to do if Charlie got involved, particularly when he refused to tell us where you were, so I sent him away. And Ike decided to play lone wolf up here which meant I had limited choices. Lucky for all of us that Charlie came through in the end anyway.”
“The operative word is luck, Mr. Director. Really!” Eden finally joined the conversation. Ike was convinced she had no idea what had happened and probably never would, but the lack of information was not the sort of thing to stop her from voicing an opinion.
“As you know,” Charlie said, “Ike and I have a mutual acquaintance who’s conveniently connected to the FBI and a special way but, more importantly, is skillful at rooting around in other people’s hard drives and servers and electronic whatnot. I asked this person to look at all the intel in the three areas subsequent to the three operations we spoke about. She did as I asked and sent me some critical data. Data that, had the director known, would have obviated all of this including, I am forced to say, Archie’s killing. But the agency, though in possession of the reports, had not extracted the information and made the connection on their own. Thus, four dead on our side and however many on theirs.”
“Once Charlie sent it back to us, we only had to confirm and get up here.”
“A day late and a dollar short, I’m thinking. If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Barr and her sharp-shooting you would have had nothing but corpses and funerals to show for all your efforts.” Ruth muttered.
“We’d have had enough to stop the confirmation and enough to put Osborn away forever.”
“Fat lot of good that would have been for me and Ike.”
The director slammed his fist on the arm of his chair. “Ms. Harris, I am sorry you were caught up in this. Why you stuck around and suffered this, I will never understand, but I have to say what happened here and in the previous week was never about you and Ike.”
Ruth made a rude noise.
“Easy there, Harris,” said Ike. “Hear the man out. So what was the connection that Sam…I assume it was Sam who tip-toed around the agency’s firewall…what did she find?”
“Ostrofsky.”
“Who?”
“The doctor in Nigeria. Do you remember?”
“I thought you said he was dead.”
“Nope, not dead—well not until tonight when Mrs. Barr dispatched him with a clean shot to the head.”
“You’ve lost me. Osborn was Ostrofsky?”
“Yes, and it’s about what Archie knew. Archie had ways of finding things out and using the information to his advantage, if you remember.”
“I do, and I recall he said he found out something about the operation, but he always said things like that, so I let it slide. You’re saying Archie knew that Ostrofsky was up to something in that hospital?”
“He did and incidentally used that knowledge to extort a sizable number of Krugerrand from the doctor until, that is, the doctor was reported dead. Shortly afterwards we sent Archie to oblivion, or so we thought.”
“Archie was on the take? No surprise there. So, let me guess, they thought, whoever they are, that Archie might have shared that information with the rest of us. Therefore, if Archie had to be rubbed out—”
“The safest thing to do would be to eliminate all possibilities. I don’t know if they believed the three of you knew anything, but they figured they couldn’t take the chance that you didn’t.”
“Wait a minute. You put Archie away with a false ID and the whole disappearing package. How did they find him?”
“Do you remember Archie’s third wife—or was it number four—whatever, Cora?”
“Vaguely. Why”
“The Las Vegas police have her on a slab in their morgue. Someone strangled her last week and left her in the street. We’re assuming they couldn’t find Archie, but they did find his ex-wives—at least one of them. Somehow she knew where he’d gone to ground. Archie must have hooked up with her.”
Ruth started to fade. She sat forward and asked, her voice hoarse, “Okay, enough already, just cut to the chase, what did Archie Whitlock know that was such a big deal that it justified murdering four people and your lot sitting on your hands and doing nothing while Ike and I took on the bad guys alone…with Ms. Barr included, of course?”
“Trafficking in human organs.”
“Excuse me?”
“He wasn’t swapping arms for blood diamonds. He was swapping them for people.”
It took several seconds for the idea of someone running a human abattoir in the heart of a moderately civilized nation to sink in.
“That would explain the razor wire and the guards around the hospital. It wasn’t to keep people out. It was to keep people in. But who were his buyers?” Ike asked.
“Two sets of buyers, some local and some international.”
“Local? I can hardly believe that.” Ruth was back in form.
“Body parts, particularly those connected with sex, have always comprised an important part of the African and Asian folk pharmacopeia. Traditional medicine and witch doctors used to harvest them illegally. With the growing modernization of most countries, particularly as regards police and humanitarian laws, their sources have dried up. Ostrofsky stepped in and filled that niche with the bits and pieces left over from his organ donors. I guess donor is not what they were, actually. They were certainly not willing donors, anyway.”
“That’s awful! But how did he do it?”
“He had a sophisticated tissue typing laboratory on site, several surgical suites, and buyers around the world—Europe mostly. If someone needed a kidney, heart, you name it, all they needed to do was talk to someone who would check with someone else and for the right price Ostrofsky would slice and dice. Do you recall a helipad on the premises, Ike?”
“I wondered about it, but assumed it had been built for med-evac work. He helioed the parts out to…where? South Africa, Botswana? No, Abuja or Lagos. From there he’d be only hours away by private jet to anywhere in Europe, Africa, or the east.
Am I right? And you’re telling me that Dr. Ostrofsky and Osborn are one and the same?”
“As it happens, yes.”
“And no one figured that out until Sam hacked into your files?”
“Not exactly, well, no…but you must understand—”
“What’s to understand? Our friends in Africa hint there is something really rotten about this guy. They may even have believed he was the butcher they had to deal with a decade or more before, but as he was under the wing of the privileged and political elite in this country and what, a major contributor to several politicians’ campaigns? So, they were diplomatically cautious. And all you could do is wonder why? Please, say it isn’t so.”
“Ike—”
“Mr. Director, with respect, you know how I feel about you personally and the agency generally and that in spite of the mess it made of my life at one time. Having said that, clearly this latest fiasco has to go down as one of the agency’s biggest screw-ups ever. How in the world? Even for someone like me, who has seen the darker side of your game…I’m appalled.”
“But the mess was caught in time.”
“Caught in time! Jesus, at what cost and to whom?”
Ruth heaved herself up out of her chair, staggered slightly, and surveyed the room with a scowl.
“I’ve heard enough. I’m going to bed. Mother, the guest room has a fire laid and it’s yours. The rest of you are on your own. I expect the bunch of you to be off the premises and gone in the morning. Goodnight. And tomorrow, Schwartz, we move to Plan B.”
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Table of Contents
Scone Island
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Map
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
More from this Author
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Scone Island Page 24