“I really hate this business,” I told him grimly. “I hate seeing the personal cost of war, up close and personal.”
“But for all you’ve seen, my love, this is only the tip of the iceberg above the water’s surface.”
In all the years I had known him and loved him, Ben had never spoken of his experiences as a spy. For the most part, the missions he had undertaken were highly classified. But I also knew that he kept his secrets to protect me. He didn’t want me thinking about the brutality of war and fragility of the human spirit when subjected to great pressure. He had seen and done things of which he chose never to speak, but he did them as a man with as clear a conscience as possible. That meant he sometimes brooded into the wee small hours of the night, sequestered in his armchair before a roaring fire, remembering those whose lives were lost, those whose lives were betrayed, those whose lives were uprooted by all of the smoke and mirrors that was the cornerstone of intelligence services and networks around the world. Ben lived his life by a code of honor as best he could, clinging to it like a life raft amidst the flotsam and jetsam of a disaster in an ocean crowded by sharks. I knew it wasn’t easy for him to accept the things he knew he had to do to get the job done. The life of a spy wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t kind, but better men and women who carried the mantle as Ben did, than to leave it to the Philippe Grapons of the world. The French had their hands full with that bastard.
We drove in silence, still twenty minutes from the airport. I busied myself with the scenery, but even as I watched the roadside fly by, I was struck by the possibilities. What if Philippe was only working for the French, and they were trying to help the Syrians? Why did Ben think the Syrians were involved in the first place? And what if Philippe was following orders for the French, and someone at Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure was the real bad guy? That’s the problem with the spy business. You can be false-flagged so many times, you think you’re working for the good guys, when it’s really the bad guys pretending to be the good guys. Sometimes it’s the good guys, pretending to be the bad guys, while still being the good guys. Without a scorecard, it’s hard to tell who’s on the right side, who’s on the wrong side, and even who’s on the winning side.
“Why did you say it might be the Syrians that Grapon is working with?” I broke the silence with that question.
“No real reason,” he told me, shaking his head. Liar. No reason to let him get away with that, I decided.
“Ben, why did you say it might be the Syrians?
“I might have heard a rumor from a birdie across the river.” That usually meant someone in the Washington FBI field office dropped a hint to the CIA liaison, who then passed it along to the rightful heirs of the information, so they could act on it appropriately.
“Meaning?”
“It’s possible that Grapon was photographed meeting with a Russian and a Syrian counterpart on a hiking trail in Damascus two weeks ago.”
“He was in Syria?”
Chapter Eight --
“No, Virginia. Damascus, Virginia. It’s up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, near Mount Rogers National Recreation area. It’s a favorite meeting area outside Washington for Middle Easterners.”
“Oh,” I said, somewhat surprised by the revelation. It was scary to think bad guys were plotting along the Appalachian Trail.
“When spies from hostile intelligence services need to huddle together in the US and don’t want to get caught at it, they find a US location with a foreign name. Say that it’s Paris, Virginia, or maybe Berlin, Maryland. The CIA station chief waits for them to show up in the announced locale overseas, so it wastes CIA resources. Meanwhile, they’re really trying to elude the FBI here in the States. If they provide their conspirators with a set of GPS coordinates, hiding it on a blog or in a chat room communication that isn’t noticed by law enforcement, they can get together without any watchful eyes monitoring them most of the time. In this particular case, they said openly in a phone call that they would meet again in Damascus, like they planned to go to Syria. Instead, they did some climbing in Virginia. My little birdie friend said the Russian laid down some sensors on the trail, so they would know when other folks were hiking in the area.”
“Sensors?” That sounded serious.
“The FBI counterintelligence people found them and figured out that this was a really big meeting, Bea. That’s really all I can tell you. We don’t know what the endgame is. We don’t know why Grapon is involved, or whether the French have sanctioned it. It could be a French effort to throttle a Russian effort to assist the Syrians.”
“Everything is so complicated. How do you manage to keep it all straight?”
“Sometimes we can’t. But we do our best. That’s really all we can do. We need to know who the bad guys are and we need to neutralize them. Murder is always a last resort.”
“Like that poor girl.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “It’s quite possible that Grapon gave her too much of a drug while he was trying to question her or even just knock her out for a bit. He could have even suffocated her accidentally when he thought she might give him away. Then again, he may have killed her as part of a plot to set us up, ‘Mr. Williams’, or even the CIA response to the crisis in Syria. It’s hard to say without more intelligence in the form of evidence and information.”
“And ‘Mr. Williams’ is a woman, not a man.”
“We’ll pick her up and see what Grapon does next. My best guess is we have eyes on us at all times. This is too important to national security to leave it alone. If Grapon doesn’t know people are onto him yet, he thinks he’s just going up against me, and he probably assumes he can fool me. Hence, he posed as a potential witness to the cabana fire.”
“Wouldn’t that suggest the girl was deliberately murdered to set you up?” I wondered.
“Or that she died when he screwed up and didn’t want to get caught at it. If he tried to debrief her, to interrogate her, Bea, and she didn’t have any answers for her, he might have killed her to thwart ‘Mr. Williams’ from uncovering the clues to the coded message she carried in the form of tattoos. If so, he’s likely to be waiting at the airport for her plane. Then again, maybe he tried to seduce her just for the fun of it and she changed her mind. Or she took something chemical to enhance her own sexual pleasure. Or Philippe slipped her a date rape drug. We just don’t know.”
“Never a dull moment,” I muttered, turning back to the scenery. My mind was growing numb with all of the shenanigans. How did one keep it all straight? It was rather like a Shakespearean plot, with treachery and deception abounding. Probably why Uncle Edward was such a fan of the Bard. He lived the life centuries after Shakespeare told his tales.
Ten minutes outside of Burlington, Ben’s smartphone buzzed and pulled over to the side of the road. I sat, waiting, as he stepped outside and out of earshot. That’s the thing about spies and former spies. Old habits die hard. Watching the traffic whiz by, I wondered what we would find when we got to the airport. Would “Mr. Williams” turn out to be a diversion, a red herring of some kind? Someone was going to a lot of effort. That’s really all we knew for sure. Someone was working this game hard, but what was the name of the game? And who was sponsoring it? If the meeting in Damascus, Virginia involved the Russians and the Syrians, and if Philippe had gone over to the dark side, he was working for the bad guys. If he was trying to penetrate for the DGSE, technically Philippe was a good guy, even though his morals and personal conduct left a lot to be desired. But what if he was just out for himself? What if he was collecting a paycheck from everyone?
My thoughts were interrupted when the car door opened, Ben climbed back in beside me, and handed me his smartphone.
“This should make you feel better, Bea.” I looked down at the photo identification that was splashed across the screen. There was a cheerful young woman staring boldly back at me.
“Celia Dusquesne. Oh, she was only twenty-four. How sad. This says she was a graduate student
at the Sorbonne.” Carefully studying the face of a once-vibrant girl, I noticed she wasn’t classically beautiful, but certainly very attractive. Her smile was bright, her eyes sparkling, and in live, her skin had a rosy glow that seemed to suggest good health. Surely she had already charmed a number of men with her attributes -- of that I had no doubt. Celia seemed to have an abundance of personality. I wondered if that translated to a sense of arrogance that she was well beyond danger, and if so, had she thrown caution to the wind while trying to out-manipulate someone like Philippe Grapon.
“There is one possibility we failed to take into account,” Ben said, as he swung back out into traffic. “Celia may have been working with Philippe as his accomplice.”
“Stop,” I said, putting a hand to my temple. “You’re making my head hurt with all the possibilities. The trouble is we don’t know what she was doing at the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast or why she was there. All we really know is that she was dead under the bed in the Ephesus Suite. We don’t know who killed her, what killed her, or where she was killed.”
“All true. But we do know that Grapon was involved in some way, good or bad, and that he was working in concert with the man who stole Celia’s body.”
“And we didn’t really see his face, did we? Would you recognize him if you saw him again?” I wondered, smoothing out an invisible wrinkle on my lap.
“Why?”
“Because we’ll be on alert for Philippe at the airport, won’t we? What if Mr. X takes advantage of the situation? What if he kills ‘Mr. Williams’ while we’re busy with the French philanderer?”
“The next time you wonder why I married you, remember this moment,” said my husband, patting my knee with great affection.
“I don’t understand.”
“You have an innate sense of the spy game, darling, but also a great disdain for it. You don’t take any crap from me, but I also know you live by your own moral code, so I don’t have to worry about you plotting and planning behind my back. That’s not your way. I always knew when I came back to you, you would be who you are,” he smiled. “One professional spy in the family is more than enough.”
“Only I am not who I was, and there are at least two professional spies in the family if you count Uncle Edward. Technically, I’m more than just a private citizen, not of my own volution, and far too involved in the murky world of espionage for my liking.”
“And yet, you chose to love a man like me.”
“Chose? Hardly. How was having you in my life a choice?” I demanded. “You were thrust at me like a Christmas puppy, and no one told me you would foul the carpet or that you needed housetraining!”
“Housetraining? I needed housetraining?” Ben was appalled. “How can you even hint that I was in anyway uncivilized?”
“Easy,” I retorted. “If you recall the first time we met, it’s not as if you were well-behaved.”
“That wasn’t my fault!”
“Not your fault that you were stark naked in the street?
“She stole my clothes while I was asleep!”
“And if you hadn’t been sleeping with her, do you think you might have remained decently clothed?”
“I was doing my job! I was distracting a female intelligence operative, so she couldn’t help her friends blow up a United States embassy in Africa!”
“By using sex!” I replied with great disgust. “You couldn’t play a few hands of rummy? You couldn’t take her to dinner and regale her with tales of your college days, or just knock her out and be done with it? Good Lord, what in heaven’s name would you do without me to keep you honest?”
“Is that how you see your role in our marriage? You are the moral compass?”
“Someone has to be.”
“So, I am a charity case to you? A bastard who needs a good scrubbing before the lady of the house will allow him to enter through the cellar door? ‘Wipe your feet!’” Ben sent his voice into a falsetto on that last bit, pretending to be me.
“You have a problem with wiping your feet on the doormat?”
“That presumes my feet are filthy when I come home from an assignment.”
“Better to wipe them on the mat than to get that filth all over me, buster!”
“That assumes that I’m a bad guy and I go around doing dirty deeds all over the world, like some twisted James Bond!” he hissed at me.
“Well, if the boot fits....”
“I do what I do, Bea, so that people like you can sleep at night! My life is not all murder and intrigue because I can’t live without the excitement of the chase!”
“Oh, you mean you’re not an action junkie? You think now in your retirement from the CIA, you will be satisfied to live the life of a country gent who happens to own a bed and breakfast? That’s why we are now on our way to the airport to pick up a woman claiming to be a man? What’s wrong with having a nice establishment with classy guests and no dead bodies under the bed?” I demanded.
“Do you want to know why Uncle Edward opened the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast? Do you?”
I watched as the vein on Ben’s neck grew thick, and I knew he was upset with me. But frankly, it was my plan to get the spies out of my establishment. There was no reason we had to have them mucking up the waters of Lake Champlain, was there?
“Fine. Why did Uncle Edward open the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast? I am awaiting your answer with bated breath.”
I watched Ben struggle to regain his composure, gripping the steering wheel hard, and I knew it didn’t come easy to him.
“He was supposed to meet his wife, his beloved wife, at a little inn on the shores of Lake Louise in Canada. He was returning from an assignment to Hungary in 1952. She took the train by herself from Boston to Alberta. She checked in, spent two days there while she waited for Edward, and then she disappeared. No one could tell him where his wife was when he arrived. All they knew was that she disappeared after spending two days there. It was the Soviets’ way of punishing him for assisting the Hungarian dissidents. They held onto her for two years, Bea, and when he went back for a second stint as station chief, they gave him a choice between helping the dissidents or saving his wife. They tied her to the train tracks, forcing him to free her or watch her die a painful, horrific death. He couldn’t have both his wife and his work for the CIA.”
“What did he choose?” I asked, my throat tight, hoping he made the right choice.
“He did what was right, Bea,” Ben replied. “He saved Hortense, and then he killed the bastards who took her. He used his freedom fighters to get it done.”
“Meaning he didn’t choose between his wife and his work?”
“His wife was his life. His work was his duty. A man should never let himself be put in the position of having to choose. Uncle Edward knew what the Soviets had planned for him, because he recruited within their ranks. He killed two birds with one stone.”
“So it all worked out in the end? Uncle Edward saved the day?” Why did I think there was more to the story than that?
“And paid the price. He had to send Hortense away because the Soviets wanted revenge for their people.”
“What does that mean?” I wondered as Ben took a right and exited on the ramp to the airport. We wound our way in and out of the lanes, finally pulling into the short-term parking lot. Ben found a space across from the entrance. He turned off the engine, but held onto the steering wheel, looking off into the faraway past.
“The Soviets weren’t going to leave her alone. It was very believable, given what they had done to her in those two years she was missing. They had tried to recruit her, using psychological and physical coercion, and she learned to play along with it, in order to avoid their harsher tactics. When she told her husband the details of what they had done to her, he figured out that the only way to save her was to kill her off, so Uncle Edward staged a suicide for his wife. He wanted Colonel Demitrov to think he had discovered they were using Hortense against him and that he took her out because she turned on him. Tha
t was so they wouldn’t think he staged it because he was just trying to protect her.”
“So?” I leaned closer, wanting to know the outcome. As long as I had known Uncle Edward, he had never told me about a wife. I had always assumed he was a committed bachelor.
“So what?” Ben opened the car door and climbed out.
“What happened to Hortense?”
“She was relocated to an undisclosed location, where she was set up in a new life, with a new identity.”
“They were never together again?”
“Oh, they finally got back together in 1978, when he was a professor. She died in 1990.”
How sad to think that Uncle Edward and his wife split apart by the Cold War, that their love was disrupted for years by the need to hide her from the Soviets. The thought made me shiver. As much as Ben and I argued and bickered, I couldn’t imagine life without him. I would follow him, hell or high water, because it was where I belonged.
Did I tell him that? Did I share my deepest and darkest fears with the man I married? Heavens, no. We’re not talking about a so-called normal husband, who takes out the trash regularly, mows the lawn and cleans out the gutters on weekends, and comes home from work every day, briefcase in hand, to greet me with a cheerful hi-dee-do. We’re talking about a retired spy, a man who spent his entire adult life deceiving, duping, and disrupting the lives of some really bad people. You always have to exercise a little caution in the handling of spouses who have embraced espionage, either willingly or unwillingly. They become creatures of habit, pulling the covers over themselves even when the sun is shining brightly and the temperatures hover above ninety degrees Fahrenheit.
Let Slip the Dogs of War: A Bard's Bed & Breakfast Mystery #1 Page 6