“So, I presume you have already found such an agent?”
“Yes, sir, we have. But this agent will be our test weapon. If he or she is as effective as we think he or she can be; and the nice folks who ‘facilitate manmade disasters’ begin to howl and cry foul; we will have our answer. We can then turn up the heat with some more agents until the real facilitators—the Saudis, Syrians, Iranians, and our allies, the Egyptians and Pakistanis—sue for an armistice. They will never be able to prove that we are behind the assassinations; but they will be sure; and they will be afraid. They will realize that the U.S. is as Khrushchev described us when the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of world war three: ‘The Americans will take hit after hit and insult after insult, and will look like paper tigers. Then they will suddenly shoot you in the heart’. He backed off, and we think that—faced with a personal threat from a phantom—so will our current…”
“I hate secrets. You know that. They always seem to come back to bite the president’s butt. How can you be sure, I mean absolutely sure that the secrecy can be maintained; so, we can deny the existence of our phantom without being humiliated?”
The DCIA interjected, “By having the fewest possible people in and out of the government know who he or she is, what he or she does, and by what authority and with what resources. The right hand will not know what the left hand is doing. No person other than the phantom will know exactly what is happening, who the targets are at any given time, and when and where our attack will take place. We are even going to obscure our own vision by a series of cutouts. Finally—and I hate to say this—if the phantom becomes a liability, we will remove him or her.”
“I’m not sure I care for this veiled reference to he or she, him or her. I presume that I will have a full set of information about the project, the phantom, and the missions before, during, and after the fact.”
“No, sir, we thought long and hard about that. The DCIA will not have any further information passed to him after today. We will not give you information in order to keep you squarely in the position of having full plausible deniability. You won’t have to flinch when you tell the media that you don’t know a thing about any assassinations. Our stance is going to be that those bloodthirsty ‘facilitators’ are having an interfamilial fight; you know how violent they are against each other. The Sunnis and the Shi’ites are at each other’s throats as usual, or the Egyptians are taking out the Syrians, or the Iranians are trying to take over the whole movement, or Al Qaeda is having a quiet war with Hamas, whatever.”
The president steepled his fingers against the bridge of his nose and was lost in silent thought for a full three minutes.
“I am reluctant—most reluctant—but I guess this is only the worst possible plan except for all of the other possibilities. Go ahead, but nothing in writing. Not a thing.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Early the next morning, Oliver and Hunter drove in Oliver’s black Lincoln Town Car with overly tinted windows into the District. Oliver moved briskly across the George Washington Memorial Parkway Bridge to the Virginia side of the Potomac and to the CIA building in Langley—technically, in a part of McLean, Virginia, an unincorporated area of Fairfax County a few miles west of the District of Columbia. There was no need for the two men to talk; Hunter had already given a firm ‘yes’, that he would take the intelligence job as they met over coffee at Oliver’s breakfast table an hour earlier in the morning. Oliver pulled into the South Gate entrance, showed his credentials to the gate guard—who checked it thoroughly even though he had seen Oliver two hundred times a year for the past fifteen years—and were waved through. They drove through a beautiful, lush, green forest to the Original Headquarters Building [OHB]. Oliver parked his official vehicle with its brilliant green parking permit sticker in the covered parking area for ranking officers in a space that read Deputy Director, Central Intelligence, NCS. Oliver made a short detour to the OHB courtyard; so, Hunter could see the statue of Nathan Hale. Then he and Hunter walked up a short flight of stairs and into the main lobby. Oliver led him to the north wall where the memorial to fallen CIA heroes was placed. On the wall, in neat rows, were engraved 83 black stars with no names. On one side of the wall of stars was an American flag and on the other a CIA flag. In the center was a book with, again, 83 stars, but only 48 names.
Hunter looked at Oliver’s face for answers.
Oliver said, “The others are still classified.”
The two men returned to the center reception desk, walking across the 16 foot diameter inlaid CIA seal. Oliver asked the attractive middle-aged woman for a visitor’s pass for Hunter and was given one with alacrity. The receptionist asked for Hunter’s name. Oliver put up his hand in a stopping motion.
“We won’t need to record that, Penny,” he said in a friendly voice of authority.
“Yes, sir,” the receptionist said and waved the ADCIA and the visitor on.
They ascended the elevator alone to the seventh floor to the DCIA’s suite of offices. It was too early for the regular workers to come in. Oliver asked Hunter to sit in a small well-appointed conference room while he went to find the other participants for their upcoming formal conversation.
Oliver was right at home in the inner sanctum of the house of power and secrets. Hunter quietly assessed his friend who had risen to such heights. He was a little older, considerable thinner and more athletic in appearance, taller; and he still appeared to be very fit and not a man to mess with, owing in no small measure to the fact that he had been in special ops in Viet Nam for several tours—not as long as himself—Hunter reflected—but long enough to be a formidable individual.
Hunter envied the man his comfortably worn good looks. He still had his full head of curly black hair; Hunter was well on the way to being the poster boy for the male-pattern-baldness-is-sexy campaign should it ever get started. As a result, he wore his hair very short cropped in a military cut. His eyebrows were too full; and his eyes too close together for him to be handsome; and his large nose had a hook shape that cried out for a cosmetic nose job. He had acne scars pits on a tanned face, full lips, and a strong chin. He also had a strong Adam’s Apple, a prominent feature. He was not displeased with himself despite his lack of the genetically inherited or surgically enhanced handsome facial features; and he had that distinctive facial scar.
Unlike Oliver, he did not have a tennis player’s nice tan. Also unlike Oliver, his teeth were neat, but not perfect, yellowing slightly in contradistinction to Oliver’s pearly whites standing in perfect even condition; he had had work done that Hunter could not afford early on and later could not find time to take to get the cosmetic changes. He was quite ordinary—six feet tall, but the definition of his trained muscles showed even under his well-fitted white Van Heusen dress shirt. Hunter had the body of a man shorter than six feet in height—more like a prize fighter than a business executive—and he carried himself in an habitual protective posture. He wore a black three piece suit and a patterned red bow tie. His black wing-tip shoes gleamed from a recent polishing. His outfit was not in the same class as Oliver’s, but he felt like he was dressed as if he belonged. He had been a slob in country when the two of them ran around Hué and its environs and especially when they had moved their irregular PRUC troops around the Mekong Delta riverine country.
The Provincial Reconnaissance Unit Cadres were CIA created and directed hunter-killers, the like of which the world was not likely to see again. Both he and Oliver had been PRUC officers. Hunter was definitely impressed that his friend had come so far after 1975—deputy director of the National Clandestine Service [NCS]—as it was now called officially—a position to be able to make a real difference.
Hunter took a moment to look in the mirror on the south wall. He evaluated himself as objectively as he could and concluded that he had progressed from a young average looking man to a middle-aged face-in-the-crowd, one of the gray people to whom no one paid attention—everyone’s
dad—maybe even young grandpa—with his only distinguishing feature being his facial scar. His hair, he admitted, was past being thin; and it was greyer than it should have been. He had hazel irises like practically everybody else and in most respects was pretty much average, he thought. Maybe that was an advantage in his prospective new assignment. He probed and pinched the skin of his face. His facial features were definitely blah, not large or small or crooked or marked, or hairy, and definitely not a head-turner for the ladies. Despite his stint in the navy, he had stayed sober enough not to get a tattoo, not even a large Phoenix bird on his back or the “Sat-Cong” on the pectorals that most of the members of the small fraternity of secretive men with whom he had served had had needled onto their skin in order to show their allegiances.
“Oh, well,” he sighed, chalking it up to the rest of his mediocre life of late.
Oliver returned in ten minutes accompanied by two other fashionably suited men, one older and one younger than himself. They were preceded into the room by a mousy little Eastern European woman in what had to have been a government-issue blue serge suit. She was carrying a court stenographer’s recording machine.
Oliver made introductions: “Lady and gentlemen, this is an old friend of mine who, for the moment, we will call, T. You are the only people with any knowledge of why T is here, and it would be best if you did not know his name, address, and the like. Please confine your questions to other areas. T., these people are CIA officers from the Counterterrorism Unit of the NCS. They want to know a lot about you, except they don’t want to know who you are. It would embarrass them if you were to slip and give them your name or personal particulars, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Everything is going to be recorded, and a transcript printed. It will be ‘eyes and ears only’ for four people—the three of us and the DCIA. When this interview is over, you will take a lie detector test. While you may—in the course of your work for the Company—lie upon occasion; of necessity, you must not lie in even the most trivial instance today or ever to the four people outside of yourself who know your mission. I will be the only person who knows who you are, where you live, and the full details of your missions. That understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Hunter answered without irony.
Oliver smiled at that, knowing as Hunter did, that they had slipped easily back into old navy roles.
“Then, let’s begin. I’ll go first. Mr. T., that’s not your real name, correct?”
“No, sir.”
“Tell me about your military service briefly. We want to know mostly about your time in Viet Nam, your work with the CIA, and how you felt about it. You don’t need to give us your unit numbers since they could be used to trace you.”
Hunter told him—them. It took forty minutes.
Oliver turned to the older of his three companions, “Your turn.”
“T., tell us something about your life as a business man after you got back from Viet Nam, please.”
Hunter told him about getting his first job after retiring from the service with Unified Export/Import Limited which he had obtained because he spoke French—with a Vietnamese accent—Vietnamese, and Spanish, having been born and reared in New Mexico. He carefully omitted the name of the company. He mentioned that he also had an MBA. Hunter’s narrative included that he had climbed the corporate ladder rapidly and correctly read the tea leaves about his future in the company. He was granted a sabbatical and obtained a law degree from Stanford with a specialty in international law. Thereafter, he spent most of the remainder of his career in Europe where he married and sired three children, learned Italian and German, and became as familiar with the streets of Budapest and Leipzig as he was of those in Albuquerque and Washington D.C. where his daughter lived. Hunter omitted any mention of his daughter or of anything more of his family than that they existed—had existed.
As the stock market began its meteoric rise in the early nineties, Hunter went on, he opted for a stock option rather than a significant pay raise. He rose to the position of first vice-president, and when he sensed that the market was very over inflated, he cashed in on his stock options with a profit of well over ten million dollars and resigned from the company. That was in the last week of December, 2000, and the market began its calamitous decline less than a month later.
For the next five years, he developed his own company with the best and the brightest people from his former company—he told his inquisitors without telling them the name of the company—which earned him considerable enmity from several of the top officers of the former company. Loyalties were nonexistent in the corporate and legal world by then, and they soon forgot their antipathy towards him and moved on to more pertinent enemies du jour. Without boasting, Hunter informed the three agents that his timing was excellent; and the people he chose to work with in his new company were superb. In five years, they were able to merge with Fed Ex and became Fed Ex’s European arm. The senior officers of Fed Ex wanted their own man in my place, Hunter said, and made him an offer he could not refuse.
“I retired,” Hunter said, concluding, “for real this time, with a total nest egg of nearly seventy-five million dollars. I am now forty-two years old.”
“Tell us about your activities outside work. Your dossier says you are quite the hunter,” said the younger of the two men with Oliver.
“I started hunting as a kid and became more interested in the weapons and in competition shooting than in hunting per se by the time I was thirteen or fourteen. I have hunted all over North America, Mexico, Africa, in parts of the Middle-East—especially Turkey and Pakistan—and in the mountains of the ‘stans—Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and north eastern Iran. I collected trophies from all over and had them mounted in a new house—the house I shared with my family until recently.”
The three agents other than Oliver raised their eyebrows in a question to which Oliver shook his head.
“Did you prefer one kind of hunting over another?”
Hunter was not quite sure what he was getting at; so, he took a small chance to get a step ahead of him.
“I tried archery but wasn’t very good at it. I did get quite adept with a cross bow, but the hunting fraternity has a positive snit if you even bring up the word ‘cross-bow’. What I liked best was to make long shots. After a while, I sort of lost interest in hunting per se and took up long range competition shooting. There is quite a fraternity of wanna-be snipers, and all of us are fans of fifty caliber rifles. I probably wasn’t the best among my peers; but I could hold my own; and I even won a few tournaments.”
The older agent nodded, and Hunter was sure that he had provided the information for which the man was looking.
“What’s this business about you wanting to do your bit for the country in the War On Terrorism?” Oliver asked and glanced at his note pad. “I think your exact words were that you wanted to make some sort of a ‘small contribution’.”
“I don’t know, maybe it’s just a mid-life crisis; but yes, I am frustrated with the monstrous things the terrorists do; and I would love to be part of the effort to thwart them. I don’t fancy myself a James Bond type, but my bet is that there are people behind the scenes—even way behind—that do a lot. I guess—if the truth be known—that is my secret fantasy.”
Oliver asked, “How about a not great paying, hazardous, uncomfortable, and unsung hero type job that just might make a difference?”
“You are a super salesman, Oliver. How could anyone resist such a tantalizing offer with such a golden future?”
“I’m serious,” he said. “We need someone to fill a special niche. I’ll be right up-front with you. Our last guy got killed.”
“Encouraging.”
“And you remember those black stars on the wall in the lobby, the ones with no names attached?”
“I do.”
“That agent doesn’t have one, and neither will you if you die in the line of duty. You will never have happened so far as the NSC and the rest of the
government and the country know. You understand that, right?”
“No ticker-tape parades, then.”
“Not even an obituary.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
After Oliver’s cheerless description of Hunter’s slim prospects for becoming a hero, the older mana humorless cold-fishsaid, “I think we’ve learned enough for the time being. T., we’d like to have you take a polygraph test, and then talk more definitively with you about a contract.”
He got up abruptly—nodded to Oliver—and the two of them left. The younger man motioned for Hunter to follow him. They went to a room with an obvious one-way mirror. A colorless, expressionless man in a gray suit and gray tie with blue stripes nodded to Hunter and the older agent as they entered and motioned for Hunter to sit. He took the seat proffered—one with an obvious sensor pad on the seat—and sat facing the functionary across a small table which was covered with medical appearing paraphernalia. The officer who had accompanied Hunter to the polygraph laboratory turned and left the room.
The technician seated in the chair opposite to Hunter got up and said, “Please take off your shoes.”
Hunter did. He then placed a mirror next to Hunter’s left foot and proceeded to affix a sphyngmanometer to his right arm, a plethsmygraph band around his chest, electrodermal galvanic skin response electrode patches on his right hand, and had him lift his shirt while he placed ECG leads on his chest. He wheeled a computer screen up to the table so that Hunter faced it directly, then he placed a P300 wave analysis electrode headband on his forehead. Lastly, he placed a PSE machine next to Hunter’s mouth—a psychological stress evaluator for voice stress analysis.
The technician had Hunter fill out a bio form and did not indicate surprise or even change expression when Hunter made a point of not filling in his name or other identifying information. While Hunter worked on the bio, he moved his chair to Hunter’s left side.
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