Echo of War

by Grant Blackwood

  Oliver raised the lights and looked around. “Questions?”

  “Any idea how the intruders were armed?” asked Len Barber.

  “Mr. Root only got a glimpse, but he described the weapons as ‘short-barreled assault rifles.’ None of the neighbors reported hearing shots, so we’re guessing the weapons were noise-suppressed.”

  “That narrows the list, at least.”

  “What do we know about these guards?” the director asked.

  “They’d been contracted from a company out of Baltimore. Their employees are firearm qualified and heavily screened. With the exception of the guard found alive, all four had been working for the Roots for several years. Two were ex-military, one a retired police officer. The fourth had recently graduated from Wake Forest with a criminal justice degree and had applied to the Maryland State Police. We’re digging into each man’s background—bank accounts, credit problems, affiliations.”

  Carolyn Fitzpatrick asked, “The fourth man, the one that’s still alive—do you have anything to suggest he was involved?”

  “We’re working on it, but my initial impression is no.”

  “What do you base that on?”

  “Three things: one, the physical evidence at the scene; two, my gut feeling. As I said, this was a professional job. These kind of people don’t hire outsiders unless absolutely necessary. And three, the alarm system. Of all the obstacles the intruders faced, that would have been the biggest. If they’d chosen to coopt one of the guards, it would have been to gain access to the house.”

  “I’m not following,” said Len Barber.

  “The system wasn’t disengaged; it was bypassed—basically tricked into believing the house was still secure. Chances are, if one of the guards was involved, the system would have simply been turned off.”

  “Unless it’s a ruse: One of the guards turns off the system, they bypass it for a red herring, take Ms. Root, and reengage the system on the way out.”

  “We checked that,” Oliver replied. “The monitoring center logs each time the system is turned on and off. It was engaged at seven thirty-seven in the evening and stayed that way until we called one of their technicians out at two A.M.”

  “Still …”

  Oliver nodded. “Which is why we’re taking a hard look at the guards. If one of them was involved, it’d be for money, in which case we’ll find telltales: odd spending patterns, credit problems that suddenly disappear … But, as I said, I think we’re going to find this was an outside job.”

  Carolyn Fitzpatrick said, “Which brings up the question, Who are they and what do they want?”

  “And why the Roots?” added Charlie Latham. “The kidnappers had to have known who they were dealing with. Why a former DCI? I can’t imagine it’s money; there are richer targets out there—not to mention less well guarded.”

  Bingo, thought Joe McBride. Latham has just asked the question. Though McBride had nothing to support it, his instincts were telling him the kidnapping had everything to do with Jonathan Root’s background and nothing to do with money. What was it, then? Information? Root’s tenure at the CIA had ended a decade ago; what could he possibly know that would be of interest today? If in fact it was information the kidnappers were after, it had to be something earth-shattering to warrant a gamble like this.

  Concentrate on Root, McBride thought, then scribbled on his pad: What are they going to ask for, and what will they really want?

  “Joe, you have something?” asked the director.

  McBride glanced up. “Pardon me?”

  “You’ve got a light bulb hanging over your head.”

  “Oh … yeah. Most money-driven kidnappers make contact very quickly, usually with a note at the scene or a phone call within hours. Their focus is on getting the money, losing the hostage, and slipping into the woodwork. Charlie said it: This is about Root. If these people are smart enough to mount this kind of operation, they’re smart enough to know exactly who they’re dealing with and what kind of heat it’s going to bring down on them.”

  There was silence around the table for a few moments. Len Barber of the CIA said, “We’re checking our side of the house right now. Here’s the problem: Professionals or not, the kidnappers might have bought into the popular view of DCIs—that they know every secret in the kingdom. Truth is, the need-to-know rule extends all the way to the top; DCIs rarely get down-and-dirty briefings.”

  “Explain that,” said Carolyn Fitzpatrick.

  “The DCI takes his policy cues from the White House, sets the agenda for the directorates, then turns them loose. How exactly things get done is decided by the deputies, division heads, station chiefs, and ultimately the case officers on the ground. Squeezing Jonathan Root for operational details would be like asking a former Procter and Gamble executive for the chemical formula for toothpaste—he just wouldn’t know.”

  “The question is,” Latham said, “do the kidnappers know that?”

  The discussion continued for a few more minutes before coming around to the media storm the kidnapping was sure to create. Oliver told the group, “We’ve assigned an FBI spokesperson to Mr. Root; she’ll pose as a family attorney. For his part, Mr. Root’s agreed to not speak to the press without checking with us first. Whoever these people are, they’ll be watching the television.”

  The FBI director nodded and looked around. “Any questions?” There were none. “Mr. Barber, Ms. Fitzpatrick, Charlie, thanks for coming. I’ll be sure to keep you updated.”

  Once the room was empty except for McBride and Oliver, the director leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Jesus.”

  “Yeah,” said Oliver.

  “What’s this about physical evidence?” asked McBride.

  “We’ve got boot prints,” Oliver replied. “Inside and out. Whether they’ll be enough to point us somewhere, I don’t know. The lab’s working on them.”

  “What about the bodies?”

  “The coroner should have something for us this afternoon, but his first impression was the bullets used were soft-nosed. We’ll be lucky to recover anything bigger than a sliver.”

  Score another one for the bad guys, McBride thought Oliver was right—these people were professionals, from top to bottom. An image popped into his head: One by one, each of the Roots’ guards ambushed from behind, made to kneel in the dirt, feeling the cold steel of the barrel against the back of his head … Joe suppressed a shiver.

  Oliver’s cell phone trilled. He answered, listened, then hung up. “They’ve found something near the scene,” he explained, then looked at McBride. “You up for a ride?”

  “Let’s go.”

  5

  Paris, France

  Knowing time was against him, Tanner booked a pair of tickets on the Concorde. Flying at Mach 2 and sixty thousand feet, the supersonic plane would make the Atlantic crossing in half the time of standard commercial flights. Whether an extra five hours would make a difference, Tanner wasn’t sure, but with Susanna’s trail two weeks old he needed every advantage he could get, real or notional.

  Three hours and twenty minutes after leaving New York, the Concorde began a banking descent, circling Paris and heading northeast toward Charles de Gaulle. Tanner glanced out the window, picking out landmarks below: the Arc de Triomphe surrounded by its wagon wheel of radiating streets; Notre Dame cathedral with its Gothic flying buttresses jutting from the middle of the Seine; the Institut de Monde Arabe, its glass wall of sixteen hundred photosenstive irises winking in the sun like a sheet of faceted diamonds; and of course the ubiquitous Eiffel Tower and its gridwork of brown steel rising a thousand feet above the skyline.

  Paris is split roughly in half by the Seine, with the Left and Right Banks—the Rive Gauche and the Rive Droite—serving not only as geographical dividers but also cultural, though such differences have faded into cliché over time. Where the Left Bank was once traditionally home to struggling artists and the poor and the Right Bank wa
s reserved for the well heeled and socially elite, the lines have blurred. Prostitutes are as likely to be seen strolling the steps of the Louvre as they are in a back alley of the Latin Quarter.

  Surrounded by a ring highway called the Peripherique and divided into twenty arrondissements, or municipal wards, which begin at the city’s center and spiral clock-wise outward, Paris is in many ways twenty cities within a city, as each arrondissement has its own mayor, police, and fire department, as well as its own web of customs and traditions.

  For Tanner, of all the European cities he’d visited, none had the same feel of Paris, a finely balanced ambiance that was at once medieval and modem. One minute you can be wandering the dim back alleys of the Marais—literally, the Swamp Quarter—the next emerging into clamorous, bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Rue de Turenne. Turn another corner and you’re eating a lunch of pastrami and borscht at a Jewish-Algerian cafe overlooking the Place des Vosges, a park that centuries ago served as a jousting ground for knights of rival houses.

  Somewhere down there, amid the labyrinth of alleys, the glass and chrome skyscrapers, and the thousand-year-old boulevards, Susanna Vetsch was lost. She’d turned herself into a chameleon, slipped into the underworld of Paris, and disappeared.

  Once on the ground, they went through customs, picked up their bags, and found a taxi at the curb. “Bonjour,” the driver said. “Où?”

  Tanner said to Cahil, “You have a preference?”

  Bear looked up from his phrase book. “Huh?”

  “Never mind. Hotel Les Ste. Beuve, s’il vous plaît,” Tanner told the driver. “Rue Ste. Beuve.”

  “Trois cent.”

  “Non,” Tanner said, wagging a finger at him. “Deux.”

  “Oh, monsieur, je proteste! Un surcharge spéciale—”

  “Non,” Tanner repeated. “Deux!” From hard-won experience Tanner knew Parisians loved to barter and argue, and considered it all nothing more than good-natured sport. Quoting an inflated fare had simply been the driver’s way of engaging them. If he’d gotten the price, all the better; on the other hand, had Tanner pushed the matter—and done so with admirable flare—he might have even finagled a discount. As he’d read in a travelogue once, “There’s no better compliment than to be singled out for an argument by a Parisian.”

  The driver gave a Gallic shrug and smiled. “D’accord.”

  As they pulled into traffic, Cahil was riffling through his Berlitz phrase book. “What was that, I didn’t catch that.” Of Bear’s many skills, a long-term memory for languages was not one. He picked up phrases well enough to travel discreetly, but he promptly forgot them once back home.

  Tanner owed his ear for languages to his parents, Henry and Irene. From the age of seven until he entered high school in Maine, Briggs lived in a dozen different countries and saw a dozen more as his father, a teacher with a cross-cultural outreach program, led them around the globe. Employing some maternal magic Tanner had never quite understood, his mother had always managed to make their house, flat, bungalow, or tent into a home. By the time Tanner became a teenager, he was well rounded, tenaciously curious, and self-assured, having seen and experienced things his peers had only read about in books.

  “What was he saying?” Cahil asked.

  “He was trying to pad the fare. Have you learned anything useful with that?”

  “It’s a fount of knowledge. Here try this: Pouvez-vous traiter mon animal contre les tiques et les vers? There, what do you think of that?”

  Before Tanner could answer, the driver barked over his shoulder, “Aucuns animaux ont permis!” No pets allowed!

  “What did you say to him?” Tanner asked.

  Bear consulted his dictionary and recited, “Can you treat my pet for ticks and worms?”

  “Very handy.”

  “You never know.”

  Tanner had been in Paris in half a dozen times before, but never for more than three days at a time, so his memories of the city were disjointed, bits of recollections and remembered landmarks which he used to reorient himself whenever he returned. He navigated the city like a coastal sailor, taking his bearings from nearby landmarks and adjusting his course accordingly. Once down to the level of alleys and side streets, it became a matter of trusting that his mental compass would return him to the familiar. Each time he came to Paris as a transient, he vowed to return when he had more time, turn off his mental compass, and wander the quarters without worrying about getting somewhere.

  Tanner chose the Hotel Saint Beuve from memory as well. Tucked into a warren of quiet side streets overlooking the sixty-acre Luxembourg Gardens, the Saint Beuve’s exterior was that of a Gothic mansion, while inside it was appointed with baroque furniture, open-hearth fireplaces, and a muted color scheme of tapestries that lent the rooms a medieval flair. Few tourists recognized the Saint Beuve for what it was, let alone bothered to venture inside. Parisians treated the Saint Beuve as a well-kept secret, a country retreat in the center of the city.

  The front desk receptionist happily reported she had a double room for them. “And how long will the messieurs be staying?” she asked. She was in her early twenties with bobbed black hair and a disarming smile.

  Tanner replied, “A week, perhaps two.”

  “Very good, sir.” She signaled for a bellhop, who walked over. “This way, messieurs.”

  Once they were settled into their room, Cahil headed for the shower while Tanner called Holystone. Oaken picked up on the first ring. “Where’re you staying?” he asked Briggs.

  “Hotel Saint Beuve, the Luxembourg Quarter.” He gave Oaken the address and phone number and heard the tapping of computer keys.

  “Okay, here … There’s a FedEx office three blocks away on Toumon; give them a call, they’ll deliver your package.”

  “Package” was Oaken’s own code for what was known in tradecraft jargon as a “dump”: spare phones, a pre-loaded laptop, sanitized credit cards, emergency communication procedures. As this was a personal mission, Tanner hadn’t expected it. “Oaks, I don’t—”

  “No arguments, just take it. Check in when you can.”

  “Thanks, Walt.”

  “No problem. One other thing: I’ve got a lead for you. His name is Frank Slavin; he works for DEA Intell out of the embassy.” Oaken recited Slavin’s phone number, then said, “He’ll know you by Dan Watts; he’s expecting your call.”

  “Another member of the Walter Oaken Secret Friends Network?”

  “Not after this. When I mentioned Susanna’s name, he clammed up; I could feel the chill through the phone. I had to twist his arm pretty hard.”

  “How hard?”

  “Very. Whatever she was into, Briggs, it was dicey.”

  Tanner agreed. There were only a few reasons why the DEA would be so miserly with information about Susanna, and none of them were good: One, whatever her assignment, it was potentially scandalous; two, digging into her disappearance might jeopardize an ongoing operation they’d decided was more important than a single agent’s life; or three, they had reason to believe she was still operational. If this were the case, the DEA was pushing her too far out on the limb. In Tanner’s experience, the only time you let an agent vanish was when you’d established a network capable of tracking him or her down the rabbit hole.

  Was someone watching out for Susanna? he wondered. He hoped so. Either way, he was going to find out for himself.

  “What does Slavin know about me?” Tanner asked Oaken.

  “You’re a retired DOJ investigator and an old friend of Gill’s.”

  “He’s going to try to snow me.”

  “Probably,” Oaken replied with a chuckle. “Something tells me it won’t work.”

  “Do me a favor: Keep Gill up to speed; I don’t want him sitting around wondering. I’m a little worried about him.”

  “Already talked to him. Between Leland and me, we’ll be talking to him every day until you find her.”

  �
�You’re a good man, Oaks.”

  “Ah, yes, but a bad camper.”

  “Better that than the opposite,” Tanner replied.

  “True enough. Good hunting, Briggs.”

  Tanner called the FedEx office, and twenty minutes later the package was delivered to their door by the hotel’s concierge. Inside the box they found two Motorola satellite phones, a Sony Vaio laptop, a pair of Visa cards for each of them, and a short note:

  PHONES YOU KNOW; CREDIT CARDS FRESH AND FULLY BACK-STOPPED; LAPTOP PRELOADED WITH BRIEF AND COMM PROTOCOLS —READ ALL BEFORE FIRST MEETING; MIGHT COME IN HANDY. SEE JPEG 1 ON DESKTOP: PIC OF YOUR CONTACT.

  Oakes

  Reading over Tanner’s shoulder, Cahil said, “He’s a good man.”

  “That’s what I told him.” Tanner powered up the laptop, then clicked on the file labeled “JPEG 1,” which was a copy of what Tanner assumed was Frank Slavin’s embassy ID card. “Think you can spot him?” Tanner asked.

  “Handsome devil like him? No problem.”

  Tanner clicked on the “Brief” folder on the desktop. They started reading and finished twenty minutes later. As usual, Oaken’s attention to detail shone through. Where he’d gotten his information, Tanner wasn’t sure, but it certainly wasn’t from open sources. Bless him, Iceland was bending the rules to help.

  “This guy is going to wet himself once you start talking,” Cahil said.

  “Let’s find out,” Tanner said and reached for the phone.

  If Frank Slavin was reluctant with Oaken, he was evasive with Tanner, citing a busy schedule as his excuse. It was only after Briggs suggested he come down to the embassy and wait for Slavin’s schedule to clear that the DEA man agreed to meet for lunch at the Bistro Cote Mer on Saint Germain overlooking Ile the Seine.

  He and Cahil left an hour before the meeting, walked through the Luxembourg Gardens, past the Sorbonne, and into the Latin Quarter. Saint Germain Boulevard lay within view of the river’s quai streets, following the contours of the shoreline. As though floating in mid-channel, Notre Dame cathedral rose from its island, buttresses arcing out and downward like the legs of a giant crab.