End of Enemies

by Grant Blackwood

  But try as he might, Tanner couldn’t shake the image of Ohira’s panic-stricken face. And then the shot … the head exploding … Who was Ohira, and why was he worth murdering?

  It was one of his many failings, he knew. As a child, the surest way to get Briggs to take on a challenge was to tell him it was either impossible or the answer was a mystery. This same character quirk had pushed him toward the SEALs, where only one in four candidates graduate, then to the ISAG, where the attrition rate exceeded 90 percent. Now, that same quirk—though tempered with hard-earned wisdom—was pushing him toward the mystery of why a man was executed before his very eyes.

  Camille saw Briggs walking across the pool patio. She felt her heart skip. Stop it, Camille. He was handsome, yes, but it was more than that. Approaching him last night was so unlike her, but she’d felt lonely and out of place. And then, as if on cue, he’d appeared.

  Tanner stood about two inches over six feet, 185 pounds. He carried himself with a sureness, an economy of motion. He was comfortable in his own skin. His hair was coffee brown, his face well tanned—probably from more time spent out-of-doors than in—and his smile was easy. His eyes were ocean-blue, their corners laugh-lined. The eyes, she thought. Yes, they were warm, but there was something else there, a hardness. It was as if they were constantly dissecting and categorizing everything they took in.

  She hadn’t slept well the night before. The incident had shaken her, but more than that, she was troubled by the way Briggs had reacted to the shooting. She’d seen such reactions before—usually in soldiers—but in other kinds of men as well, and that’s what worried her. And what about the key? He had palmed and pocketed it smoothly, without hesitation. Was he somehow involved in what had happened?

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said, taking a seat under the umbrella. “Have you ordered?”

  “Not yet.”

  The waiter appeared. They both ordered a fruit salad, wheat toast, and coffee.

  “How did you sleep?” Tanner asked.

  Camille shrugged. “You?”

  “The same.”

  A bellman approached the table and offered Tanner a small tray with a receipt and bill. “The item you requested, sir. The concierge is holding it.”

  “Thank you,” Tanner signed the slip and handed the man a tip.

  “What’s that about?” asked Camille.

  “A gift for a friend I met yesterday.”

  Breakfast came, and they ate in silence, enjoying the sun. A pair of finches landed beside their table, and Camille dropped them some bread crumbs.

  “So,” said Camille. “I never asked. Are you on vacation or business?”

  “Vacation. And you?”

  “The same. Though last night, it didn’t seem like much of one. May I ask you a question?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why did you do it? Jump over the fence, I mean. They had guns, yes? How did you know you wouldn’t get shot yourself?”

  “I didn’t. It was stupid.”

  Perhaps, thought Camille, but probably more considered than the average person’s impulse. “Well, I’ll tell you this, Mr. Tanner: If this thing between us is to go any further, it just wouldn’t do to get yourself killed.”

  “This thing?” he said with a smile. “What makes you think there will be anything between us?”

  “Women know. It’s in your eyes.”

  “Really.”

  “Oh yes. It’s a gift we have. So, your curiosity: What did it get you?” she asked. “What great mystery did you find in the car?”

  “No mystery. I was mostly concerned about other passengers. Now you: What kind of work do you do?”

  “I’m an attorney—immigration law. In fact, I do a lot of work in America.”

  “I didn’t realize that many Ukrainians wanted to emigrate.”

  “Quite a few, really, but also to Israel, Canada, Great Britain. Camille sipped her coffee. “I’m sunbathing this morning, I think. Will you join me?”

  “Maybe later. I’m going to take a run, do some diving.”

  “Diving where, for what?”

  “Up the coast a bit … for fun.”

  “You have a strange idea of vacation, I think, running and swimming.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “You’ll be careful?”

  “Always. I’d hate to miss our dinner date tonight.”

  Camille smiled. “How do you know we’re having dinner tonight?”

  “Men know. It’s a gift.”

  Camille laughed. “I accept. On two conditions. One, we make it tomorrow night. I must take the shuttle to Tokyo tonight for a meeting. I’ll be back in the morning. And two, over dinner you tell me your life story.”

  Tanner stood and pushed in his chair. “Conditions accepted. Tomorrow night, seven o’clock?”

  As Tanner walked away, Camille thought, What in God’s name are you doing? It was silly; nothing could come of it. She shrugged, deciding she didn’t give a damn.

  Tanner took the two-mile run slowly, but with the twenty-five-pound bag of rice over one shoulder and his rucksack over the other, it turned out to be a fair workout. The time passed quickly as he thought of Camille.

  Though she’d covered it well, she’d been probing him. Was it simple curiosity? Or perhaps she was wary of him, thinking he wasn’t what he claimed to be—which he wasn’t, of course. Whatever her reasons, a part of his brain was telling him to tread carefully. Another part, however, was hoping she was exactly what she seemed. Careful, Briggs, he told himself.

  He found Mitsu sitting on the front steps of the family’s hut. The boy was engrossed with a quarter-sized beetle that was crawling up his forearm.

  “Good morning,” Tanner said.

  Mitsu looked up and smiled. “Oh, hello.”

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “He lives under the house.”

  “A good place for him. Is your mother home?”

  Mitsu nodded, ran into the hut, and returned with his mother.

  Tanner laid the bag of rice on the porch. “Mitsu, please tell your mother I enjoyed dinner very much, and I would be honored if she would accept this gift.”

  Mitsu translated, and the mother smiled and bowed several times. Tanner asked Mitsu, “How would you like to take a short trip with me?”

  “I would like that very much.”

  With Mother’s blessing, they climbed into the family skiff and began rowing into the breakers. Mitsu would have made a fine addition to any crewing team; his stroke was steady and strong, and within minutes they were a quarter mile off the beach. “Here,” Mitsu said, handing Tanner a small oilskin bag with a cork stopper.

  “What’s this?”

  “Air. When you run out on the bottom, you breathe.”

  “Good idea. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  Briggs adjusted his mask, slipped on his fins, and rolled over the side.

  He hung motionless in the cloud of bubbles for a moment, then turned over, finned to the bottom, and started swimming. He wound his way around and through the coral outcrops and sea grass, watching fish and crabs and even an occasional octopus dart along the bottom. Here and there he stopped to drop a shell into his bag.

  After three minutes, his lungs began to burn, so he stopped and took a lungful of air from the bag. He swam for another three minutes, then headed for the surface. He climbed aboard the skiff.

  “Did the bag work for you?” Mitsu asked.

  “Like a charm. You’re a smart man, Mitsu-san. You know these waters well?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I found a warm spot yesterday, but I couldn’t find it today….”

  “The oyster beds. Over that way,” Mitsu said. “Do you want to go?”

  “No, I was just curious.”

  “We can go if you like.”

  “No, that’s okay—”

  Something caught Tanner’s eye. On the beach, hidd
en among the trees, he saw a glimmer, like sun on glass. The breeze shifted the limbs, and he saw it again.

  “How about tomorrow?” Tanner said.

  “Okay.”

  “Mitsu, does anyone in your village have a car?”

  “An automobile? Oh, no.”

  “Okay, let’s go back.”

  As they neared the shore, Tanner was able to make out a front fender, but as if on cue, the vehicle began creeping back into the trees. When only the windshield was again visible, it stopped.

  The skiff’s hull scraped the sand, and they climbed out, pulled the skiff ashore, and tied it to a nearby palm. Tanner pulled a shell from his bag and handed it to Mitsu. “For your rowing skills.”

  “Thank you! We go again tomorrow?”

  “We’ll see. Go on home now.”

  Mitsu nodded and ran off.

  Tanner loaded his gear into his rucksack, hefted it over his shoulder, and started jogging back toward the hotel. After a hundred yards, he dropped the rucksack, veered into the tree line, and turned again, circling back. After fifty yards he stopped, crouched down.

  Thirty feet across a dirt track he could see the vehicle’s rear bumper jutting from the foliage. He crawled ahead until he was within arm’s reach of it, only then realizing it was a dark blue pickup truck, almost identical to the one Ohira’s killers had used the night before. The license plate was missing.

  The driver’s side door opened. Tanner froze. Footsteps crunched through the undergrowth, moving toward the front of the truck. Tanner peeked over the tailgate. One man sat in the passenger seat, and through the windshield Briggs could see the driver standing near the tree line, scanning the beach with a pair of binoculars.

  Looking for me? Briggs wondered. If so, why? Because of what he’d seen, or because of the key? Or was it something he hadn’t yet considered?

  The footsteps were returning.

  Tanner risked another glance over the tailgate. The driver was Japanese, a bull of a man with a thick neck, square face, and heavy brows. Tanner committed the face to memory, then ducked down and crawled out of sight.

  The truck’s engine growled to life. After a moment it backed out, turned onto the road, and drove off, disappearing into the trees. Tanner watched it go, thinking hard.

  By the time the taxi dropped him off in Tanabe and he found a phone booth, it was almost two P.M.—almost midnight in Washington. He was about to wake somebody from a sound sleep, but it couldn’t be helped.

  It took only moments for the overseas operator to route the call to the U.S., but once there, he waited through twenty seconds of clicks as the call was sent to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland, where it was electronically scrubbed, bounced off a FLTSATCOM (fleet communication satellite), then transmitted to a secure trunk line to the Holystone office.

  Finally, the sleepy voice of Walter Oaken answered. “Hello.”

  “Morning, Oaks.”

  “Briggs … ? What time is it?”

  “Depends on where you are.”

  “How’s the vacation?” Oaken asked.

  “Never a dull moment. Can you conference me with Le-land?”

  “Sure, hang on.”

  More clicks. Leland Dutcher’s voice came on the line. “Morning, Briggs.”

  “Sorry to wake you both.”

  “Don’t worry about it. What’ve you got?”

  For the next five minutes, Tanner related what had happened, from the shooting of Umako Ohira to his spotting of the truck.

  “And you think this was more than a simple murder?” Dutcher asked.

  “Pretty sure.”

  “You have the key with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bad impulse, son.”

  A forty-year veteran of the intelligence community, Leland Dutcher had plenty of experience with on-the-spot judgment calls. He’d made his own fair share of them—good and bad.

  If ever a man embodied the “walk softly but carry a big stick” image, it was Leland Dutcher. He was soft-spoken but direct, a man of quiet authority. His appearance was a spymaster’s dream: average, medium, and unremarkable, except for a pair of hard brown eyes. In the tradecraft jargon, Dutcher was a “gray man,” and it was this lack of distinction that made him one of the CIA’s best controllers during the Cold War as he slipped in and out of the Soviet bloc under the noses of the KGB and the East German Stasi.

  When it came to his people, however, Leland Dutcher was anything but gray. He was protective to a fault. People were his most valuable resource, especially in this business, and the ends did not always justify the means.

  It was, in fact, this protective nature that had caused Dutcher’s decline at the CIA. While substituting for a hospitalized DDO during a counterinsurgency operation in Peru, Dutcher weighed the risk to the team unwarranted and ordered it out. Lives were saved, but the DDO, a political appointee from a university think tank, lashed out. Outcome notwithstanding, he argued, Dutcher had over-stepped his authority. The rift was widened further as the rescued team was debriefed and it became clear the order had not only saved lives but had also saved the network.

  For Dutcher, it didn’t require much analysis to know bullets directed at supposedly covert assets indicated a rapidly deteriorating overt situation. He said as much to both the DCI and the Senate and House Intelligence Oversight Committees, both of whom secretly agreed. Neither, however, was willing to cross swords with the DDO, who had powerful backing in the private sector.

  The subsequent intra-agency feud began to erode Dutcher’s ability to protect his people, which in turn began to taint the product. Knowing the DDO’s grudge would eventually gut the directorate, Dutcher resigned. Politics had no business in the intelligence trade, he felt. It was too dangerous for the country and too dangerous for the people who were asked to do its secret bidding.

  Six months later, newly elected President Reagan invited Dutcher for a weekend at Camp David to “shoot the breeze.” There in a cabin in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, Reagan outlined the idea of a detached intelligence organization, chartered by NSC directive and controlled by the executive branch. By the end of the weekend, Dutcher was sold. In trademark Reagan-esque fashion, the president simply shook Dutcher’s hand and said, “I’ll give you what you need. You make it work.”

  In the years that followed, Dutcher did just that. He and his people had fixed more “unfixable” problems than the American public ever knew, or would know, existed. Now Dutcher was wondering where this latest problem would take them.

  “Tell me about the key,” he said to Tanner. “We’ll do some digging.”

  Tanner described the key in detail.

  Dutcher asked, “Walt, what’s the embassy’s role in something like this?”

  In addition to keeping all the gears at Holystone turning, Walter Oaken was their resident encyclopedia. The running joke at the office was that the game show Jeopardy! had settled out of court to keep him off their show lest he break the bank. For all his knowledge, though, Oaken was unpretentious and keenly aware that people, not information, made the world go ’round.

  “By now, the Prefectural Police will have already contacted the legal attaché. It’s standard procedure.”

  “Then what?”

  “Not much. At most, a routine message to State.”

  “Good,” said Dutcher. “Do we have any in-country assets we can tap?”

  “Maybe,” Oaken said. I’ll make some calls.

  Dutcher said, “Briggs, tell me about this woman you met.”

  Tanner told them what he knew about Camille.

  “We’d best check her, too. How about these folks following you?”

  “Right now it looks like simple curiosity. I’m okay.”

  “Stay that way. Whoever they are, don’t give them any more reason to be interested in you.”

  5

  Washington, D.C.

  The CIA’s Nationa
l Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) is a nondescript concrete building with tinted windows surrounded by a barbed-wire fence at the intersection of First and M Streets. Inside, two thousand analysts and technicians go about the business of making sense of the thousands of radar, thermal, and visual images produced by satellites with names like Keyhole, Lacrosse, and Vortex. Despite such James Bondian technology that includes computers costing more than the average citizen makes in a lifetime, most of the NPIC’s analysts are devotees of the plain old eyeball.

  This was the case with Rudy Grayson, the chief interpreter on duty when the latest KH-14 images from the Golan Heights came off the printer.

  He aligned the strips vertically on his light table, then scanned them with a magnifying glass. He liked to get a feel for what he was seeing before moving on to a complex dissection, using the computer to manipulate the millions of pixels that comprised the image.

  Pixels are individual cells of varying grayscale contrast, each carrying dark and light values ranging from 1 to 10,000, each of which a computer can adjust to highlight selected features. While the human eye cannot detect the difference between, say, a value of 12 and 14, a computer can, making millions of such adjustments until an image reaches optimal resolution.

  Today, as he had been for the past four months, Grayson’s job was to confirm that both Israeli and Syrian troop strengths on the Golan matched the agreed limits.

  The nearer the date for the UN-managed buffer expansion on the Golan came, the more skittish the involved parties became. UN troops on the Golan was not a new idea, but this expansion was to begin a disengagement of both Israeli and Syrian forces that would eventually demilitarize this greatly contested chunk of land.

  The theory behind the plan was two-pronged: As long as Israel occupied the Golan, Syria would not engage in the peace process, and as long as Syria planned to militarize a repatriated Golan, Israel would not give it back. Israel remembered too well the years of Katyusha bombardment its northern kibbutzes suffered from Syrian positions before the Golan was captured during the ’war.

  Grayson was scanning the last strip when something near the border caught his eye. It was not on the Golan, but to its north and east, in the deserts of Syria.