Mesmerized

by Gayle Lynds

  The FBI director pursed his lips. "As I said, Millicent, this is hardly an easy task."

  "All right," the deputy AG agreed, "it's hard. I've stipulated to that. So what are you doing today to make it easier?"

  "All the usual internal measures," the FBI director said stubbornly. "Rechecking backgrounds, activities out of the office, changes in habits, attitudes, or financial circumstances. We stay on top of new connections and unusual trips. We follow up on information leaked to American agents abroad, and then we track who had access to the information. We check all leads, and then we try to connect all these bits of data in such a way that they lead to a culprit. I'd rather not go into any more specific detail, but I will say I'm confident we're getting close."

  "What gives you more confidence than I have?" Taurino challenged.

  "We had a break recently. It indicated that whoever passed on some newly developed data had to be a reasonably senior official, or someone who works closely with a senior official."

  "What break? What data?"

  Tom Horn scowled, "No, Millicent. I won't compromise an ongoing operation."

  "Compromise?" The deputy attorney general's jaw grew so tight the jawbone stood out like a tied-off vein. "You have difficulty with authority, don't you, Tom?" Her dark brown eyes were like bullets. "Do you seriously want me to tell the attorney general and the president that you consider them security risks who could compromise your operation?"

  Horn ground his teeth, but there was little he could do or say except to look at Kelsey. "Bobby, you explain it."

  Bobby Kelsey nodded and said gravely, "One of my people turned an ex-KGB agent in the community of former Soviet defectors. He proved to be extremely useful. Recently, he tipped us to another buried KGB slush fund, a mammoth one that had originated back in the old Soviet days. But before we got to it, it was emptied, and the money transferred to Moscow. That looks like the work of our mole." He steepled his hands and touched them to his lips. "Interestingly, outside the FCI, no one in the Bureau below assistant director knew about that fund."

  Millicent Taurino let that sink in. "So . . . you're saying it's one of your top people. How many does that narrow it down to?"

  "More than you might think," Tom Horn admitted. "All current assistant directors and above have been with us more than ten consecutive years. And from what we can tell at this point, all the special agents who work closely with them—they could have passed along the information either deliberately or inadvertently—are long-time veterans, too. Besides, if I may say so, in my opinion all the people in the Bureau who could've leaked the information are above reproach."

  " 'Above reproach' is what any deep-cover mole wants to appear to be, isn't it?" Taurino observed icily. "So you're really no farther along at all."

  The director met her hard gaze. "No, but we'll find him."

  "Or her," Bobby Kelsey said.

  "Will you?" Millicent Taurino said. "I sincerely hope so. I really do." She shook her head worriedly.

  Alone in her office, Millicent Taurino picked up her phone and touched a button. "They're gone. You can come in now." She sat back, pinched her chin thoughtfully, and gazed again at the portrait of John Marshall in his robes. He was her talisman, her silent mentor, and she had carried his picture with her to every job since she entered government. "Well, Johnny," she said to the painting, "are they fools, knaves, or alarmists? Is there a mole at all? You had your share of deviousness, didn't you, so how about some words of wisdom here?"

  She waited as if she really expected the painting to speak. Then she broke the silence with a laugh, and almost simultaneously the door to her private entrance opened. The two men who came in were a study in contrasts. Assistant Attorney General Donald Chen, head of Justice's criminal division, was a short, portly man with black hair parted neatly on the side and a full, round face. He looked like Buddha in a gray chalk-stripe suit. Behind him, hidden by Chen's considerable girth, came a slender man no taller than Chen, with a head of wispy gray hair, a pasty, indoors face, rimless eyeglasses, and a thin, merciless mouth. His pale blue eyes were intelligent and ruthless.

  Deputy AG Taurino rose from behind her desk and waved the second man to the chair closest to her. Assistant AG Chen stepped aside to let him pass. Neither Chen nor Taurino sat until the slender man did.

  "What did Horn have to say?" Cabot Lowell, national security adviser to the president, asked. Once a congressman, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and just three years ago the secretary of Defense, Lowell had a light mild voice that Millicent Taurino sensed was never raised in anger or in joy. Still, it was compelling and intense.

  "They essentially have nothing new in their internal investigation," she reported. "Which means they still have nothing."

  The national security adviser allowed his pale gaze to settle on Donald Chen. "I hope you have more than nothing for our investigation, Mr. Chen. Nothing is such a useless entity."

  "I don't know what the hell I have," Assistant AG Donald Chen growled in such pure everyday American that it was a shock coming from the mouth of a Buddha. The anomaly was not lost on Cabot Lowell, who smiled. Chen continued: "Except that Eli Kirkhart called me all hot under the collar, and I figured we'd better hear it from the horse's mouth, you know?"

  "You figured well. Let's have our personal mole hunter in."

  Taurino leaned toward her intercom. "Abby? Send in Special Agent Kirkhart."

  When despite all the years of internal investigation by the FBI, no mole was found but information continued to leak from inside the Bureau, the national security adviser and the attorney general had grown alarmed. The president had not wanted to bring in the CIA, so Cabot Lowell had suggested a top-secret Justice department investigation. No one in the Bureau would be informed, because everyone within the Bureau was suspect.

  Still, Cabot Lowell was convinced that the investigator who would have the best chance of success must be a Bureau insider. To find the right person, Lowell had studied the personnel records of every FBI employee. Elias Kirkhart had emerged as the most sound candidate: He was a maverick, a loner, an outsider. His wife had died a few years ago, and he was completely immersed in his work. He had neither friends, outside activities, nor family living in the area. And his British background gave him a sense of professional superiority over his fellow American agents and the attitude—held by English intelligence since Elizabeth I and Sir Francis Walsingham—that no one except the monarch was above suspicion. His only loyalty was to the security of "the realm."

  As Lowell had expected, Eli Kirkhart had jumped at the opportunity. Finding a highly placed mole within the Bureau was not only a challenge but a duty.

  "Sit down, Special Agent Kirkhart," deputy AG Taurino said.

  Wearing the FBI uniform as usual—conservatively cut dark suit, white shirt, blue-and-gray regimental tie knotted tightly, shined black shoes, and the faint bulge of his 10mm Smith & Wesson under his jacket—Kirkhart walked toward another of Millicent Taurino's leather armchairs. His square, bulldog face showed no expression as he sat. Taurino cocked her head, studying him.

  Cabot Lowell sighed. "I believe we can dispense with the dark glasses, Mr. Kirkhart. An affectation introduced by slovenly, half-trained pilots during World War Two and regrettably still with us."

  Eli took off his aviator sunglasses, folded them, put them into their case, and returned the case to his inside jacket pocket. He did not apologize. He was working to save the nation, and he was not going to be intimidated by a mere national security adviser. Millicent Taurino, still studying him, repressed a smile.

  "Thank you." Lowell inclined his head an inch. "Now, what do you have?"

  Eli returned the curt nod. "Last night I discovered a man I've been watching for more than a year meeting surreptitiously with a former KGB colonel, Anatoli Yurimengri. After they dispersed, I followed Yurimengri, while one of my agents tailed my man. Yurimengri drove across the river to an international transport company in Arlingt
on—Meteor Express. My original quarry went back to his office at The Washington Post. Meteor Express was closed, so I waited then returned to the Hoover building to check out Meteor Express. Interestingly, so far it looks legitimate, no KGB, FSB, or Russian connection, but its headquarters is in Maryland."

  "Get to the point, Eli," Donald Chen snapped.

  Kirkhart barely glanced at the assistant AG. "This morning I learned that Yurimengri had been murdered later in the night, and the crime had not happened in Arlington. Still, the coincidence was a bit much, so I drove back out there. Meteor Express was gone—lock, stock, and barrel." He snapped his fingers. "Disappeared. Instead, a new company had moved in overnight. That certainly got my attention, so I called the Meteor Express phone number. I found they were still in business and claimed they had never been located in Arlington."

  "A front," Millicent Taurino confirmed.

  "Indeed," Kirkhart agreed. "Which gave the murder of our former Soviet spy a new aspect, as did his meeting with my original quarry. The company that's taken over the building—Renae Trucking—also appears legitimate, by the way. The owner says she got a call in the middle of the night telling her the place was hers if she could move in right away. She wanted it, called everyone she knew to help her make such a fast move, and the rest, unfortunately, is history."

  "Who is this quarry, and why have you been observing him for more than a year?" Cabot Lowell wanted to know.

  "His name's Jeffrey Hammond. In the early nineties, he was one of the Bureau's top agents, specializing in Soviet affairs and a valuable member of the joint CIA-FBI team that debriefed KGB defectors." Kirkhart paused, and for a moment there was emotion in his voice, but it was so fleeting that only Millicent Taurino heard it: "We were partners . . . until he resigned under fire for continuing to investigate three of the defectors after they'd been cleared to stay in the country. Or that was the tale."

  Millicent Taurino sat up. "You don't believe it?"

  "Certainly not. I doubt he resigned at all. Rather, I believe he went undercover, hiding behind a current employment situation that legitimizes his staying in touch with the Soviet defectors and émigrés. His undercover status is probably so deep he reports only to somebody at the lofty top of the Bureau, maybe to the director himself. That would give him an almost free hand to snoop inside the Bureau, collect information, and pass it on to the Kremlin."

  "You think he's our mole," Cabot Lowell decided.

  Eli Kirkhart nodded. "I've suspected it for a year. Look at the whole picture: The Bureau's investigated all of its own people and found nothing. But did they ever investigate anyone who isn't in the Bureau? If I'm right, only the director and his top people know Hammond is still on the roster. On top of that, Hammond's a respected reporter for the Post, deals with Russians most days, and as a journalist has access to the Bureau. No one thinks twice if he's seen in the building. All year long, whenever I've tried to tail him, he's usually lost me. That tells me either he knows I'm after him, which I doubt, or he's automatically taking precautions because he wants no one to know what he's doing at any time, or whom he's doing it with. I think it's automatic."

  Taurino nodded thoughtfully. "He's secretive and has access. Anything more?"

  "Yes. He fits the profile for what the Bureau's psychologists call the John Walker syndrome or the Aldrich Ames syndrome." Walker was the navy warrant officer who became a very successful Soviet spy in the 1980s, partly to prove how clever he was, while Ames, arrested in the early 1990s, was considered the perpetrator of the worst spy scandal since the Rosenbergs stole the secret of the atom bomb during World War II. Ames, too, wanted to prove he was smarter than his colleagues. "Jeffrey Hammond's cocky. He has an in-your-face attitude, is divorced, and has few friends and no hobbies. According to our profiling, that sort of isolation breeds betrayal. Which is the reason the Bureau looks for agents to hire who make friends easily and keep them, or have some other anchor, like religion. As if to dot the i's and cross the t's, when the Bureau released Hammond, they labeled him a 'disordered isolate.' "

  Donald Chen objected, "That's still all theoretical and circumstantial."

  "And it fits the profile for you," Millicent Taurino said, eying Kirkhart.

  Kirkhart inclined his head. "Yes, to a certain extent." He allowed himself a rare smile. "But I have no need to prove how smart I am. I think there's a general consensus that I'm terribly bright or I wouldn't be here."

  Surprised that he had a sense of humor, the two Justice officials and the national security adviser raised their eyebrows.

  Kirkhart wiped the smile from his face. "There's one more thing. . . . Jeffrey Hammond is well off. Most turncoat spies do it less for psychological reasons than for money. You'll note my assets are meager. However, Hammond has an embarrassment of riches. He's got a major portfolio of investments plus a wad of cash in the bank that tells me he's got another, larger source of income besides his Post and Bureau salaries."

  "That could be damning," Cabot Lowell agreed.

  "There's more. In the Bureau, I've been checking the lost information not accounted for by all those we've caught recently, and most of it had to have leaked from the highest levels in the Bureau, but never from any one division in particular. That'd appear to indicate a mole with wide-ranging access to many divisions—such as a high-level undercover agent. Second, when he was tailed back to his office at the Post last night, Hammond later skipped out a back entrance. That gave him the time and opportunity to murder Colonel Yurimengri, whom I'd seen him meet earlier."

  The three officials looked from one to the other. Then Cabot Lowell nodded. "All right, it's far from real evidence, but it's certainly food for thought. Keep observing this Hammond. I'll put some of my NSA people on the director and the other brass. Good work, Special Agent Kirkhart."

  "Keep in daily touch with me, Eli," Assistant AG Chen ordered sternly, aware of Kirkhart's penchant for cavalierly going it alone.

  Kirkhart nodded and left, his back straight and military. As she watched her outer door close, Millicent Taurino glanced at the two men. "Someone who's there at the Bureau, yet not there."

  Cabot Lowell mused, "Clever, if true. Most clever."

  Donald Chen said, "Let's hope our mole-hunter's right. Our betrayer's been laughing at us a hell of a lot too long. Every time I think of the harm he's done, I worry about what in the Lord's name he's up to now. The damage he could still do . . . it's almost unthinkable."

  11

  Jeff Hammond was grim as he entered the Post's cluttered newsroom, where desks and cubicles spread like islands in a vast gray sea. Telephones rang, voices rose and fell, and the air was ripe with the odors of stale coffee and fresh newsprint. Repressed excitement had been percolating through the mammoth newsroom for hours, as reporters nailed down scheduling information and interviews for the state visit of Vladimir V. Putin, Russia's struggling president.

  Since the days of Boris Yeltsin, Russia's economic woes had continued to spiral downward, its nuclear arms had fallen into ever more dangerous disrepair, and upstart tycoons had increased their stranglehold on the country, despite the efforts of Yeltsin's successor—the reformist Putin—to reverse the trend. Not only in Moscow but in the country's far-flung districts, nearly ninety all together, local moguls had swallowed up vast assets from the dead Soviet Union for fractions of their actual worth. Thus far they had successfully repelled Putin's tax collectors, his efforts to redistribute power, and his demand that the magnates support the authority of the Kremlin and help rebuild the country.

  Unwilling to breach Russia's shaky sovereignty, the seventeen other nations of the industrialized world had waited, worried some unexpected event might tip the unstable country into an act of despair that could involve those crumbling—but still deadly—nuclear weapons.

  Just two years before, Vladimir Putin had been a colorless, unsmiling unknown when he had been appointed prime minister, Yeltsin's fifth in just seventeen months. After so much turnover, no one ex
pected the new man to last either. In fact, pundits agreed he was too inexperienced at politics, personally too naïve and unseasoned, to survive. Plus, he lacked the kind of connections necessary to make any kind of significant change in the baroque Kremlin environment.

  On paper, the experts appeared to be smart. After all, trained as a lawyer, Putin had turned his back on civilian life to join the notorious KGB shortly after graduation. He soon became a spy in one of the world's most steamy, most competitive espionage hotbeds—East Germany. Only when the Berlin Wall collapsed did he resign from the KGB and return to his hometown, St. Petersburg, to become deputy mayor. Then when his boss, the mayor, lost reelection, Putin fell back on what he knew best: The Federal Security Service, the FSB—the KGB's prime successor agency—but now as its head. So relieved was he to be back where he knew how to excel, he was alleged to have strode into the imposing red-and-yellow building that housed the central Moscow headquarters—a place most people entered with fear and trembling—and announced, "I'm home at last."

  But once elevated to prime minister, the decorated spy fooled everyone. He hard-lined on the Chechen war and became the most popular politician in Russia. The next year, he easily won election to the presidency, succeeding Boris Yeltsin.

  News of President Putin's arrival tomorrow appeared throughout today's Post, making Hammond's analysis of Colonel Yurimengri's life and death particularly timely. To Hammond's way of thinking, everything was perspective.

  Which brought up the issue of Beth Convey. When the call had come that she was in the lobby and wanted to speak to him, he prepared himself for whatever unpleasant course he would have to take. There was a point in their conversation when he sensed she recognized him, which could be a fatal mistake. It was too bad, too. He liked the looks of her—all that fresh blondness, and the dark brows, and the long legs. He liked the way she moved—warm and liquid. He also liked the bear-trap mind. Sometimes she seemed delicate, and then within seconds she was a damn Valkyrie, all action and sex appeal. And then there was her voice, low and throaty. A bedroom voice, his grandmother used to call it.