by James Quinn
Dempsey shook his head.
“Well,” continued Koening, “they were part of the original hit-teams we trained up to take care of Raul Castro. Good operators, tough guys. They seem to have tired of being political and have gone into the murder for hire business. Drugs guys, mafia guys, anyone really. There's a lot of talent down here that we trained Troy. Not all of it is good.”
Dempsey downed his drink in one. It was sweetly sickening, but with a hell of a kick at the end.
Koening let out a laugh. “Man, you've spent too long drinking Tom Collins in DC.”
Dempsey pushed the glass to one side and returned to the conversation. “What about guys from DC, Paul? You run into any of those over the past few months, professionally speaking of course?”
For the first time, Koening's clubby persona had evaporated and was replaced by a look of mistrust. He shook his head. “No, no one that I'm aware of, Troy.”
Dempsey let the silence linger and then gave Koening a look that said 'I can wait all day for you to join the dots'. He had a list of Higgins' travel details over the past few years. The man had been all over the world on Agency business, including a trip to Miami several months ago. There was nothing unusual in that. Except that when he was meant to be down here on CIA business, he had evidently been meeting with a former CIA officer turned scumbag private eye. The phone records from Higgins' internal line had shown that. Not the details of the conversation, of course, just that the phone line in Miami belonged to Koening.
Koening blinked first. “Okay, what's this about? You make an appointment to see me using an alias, you travel all this way, and when I arrive, I find not some swinging dick whose wife is humping one of our Cuban brothers, but a CIA man I haven't seen for three years. What gives?”
“I'm not hearing a no from you, Paul. Not hearing a yes to be fair, either. All that I'm hearing at the minute is a lot of stalling.”
Koening held up his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, you know I can't discuss my clients, confidentiality and all that.”
“Richard Higgins. That name ring a bell, Paul?”
“Hey, hey, hey… Don't even ask. Client confidentiality, you must be aware of that, Troy. They still have that in DC. I don't have to answer shit; I don't work for the Agency anymore. I'm freelance.”
Dempsey leaned in close, threatening in his manner. “You listen to me, you dumbass. You never leave the Agency, even when you're buried six feet under you're still on the reserve list. You understand? Now Higgins – you've heard from him, yes?”
“You can't make it stick. I'm protected by a senior Agency official. I'm fireproof, Troy, so fuck you… arrrgghh!”
Dempsey had laughed and then jammed a big meaty hand into Koening's crotch. He grabbed, squeezed and most disturbingly, held on in a vice-like grip.
The color drained from Koening's face and he let out a low mewl, his breath coming in rapid pants like he was struggling to breathe underwater. “Now Paul, it might seem like you have the upper hand, but believe me when I say it only seems that way. You say you have the protection of a senior CIA man, well, who am I to doubt you? But you're not thinking straight, Paul, you don't have the whole picture, the big picture.”
Dempsey squeezed again, to emphasize his point. He glanced around; no one was paying them any attention.
The Cubans were too busy fondling the asses of their girlfriends to care what two businessmen were up to. “I can beat your pair of aces hands down, especially as I have the DCI himself in my corner. Now you better start being co-operative double quick, or I might have to have the IRS come in and audit your books and check everything is above board, or maybe have the feds snoop around and raid your business premises. Maybe you fancy doing a little jail time, I'm sure we could make that happen. Don't worry about the crime, we can think of something. Of course, that's the official way. Perhaps I could arrange for those guys, the Diaz brothers, to make you disappear permanently.”
Dempsey released his grip and watched as the other man sagged forward, relieved that the pain in his groin had disappeared. “I'm just going to the bar to get a real drink and when I get back, and hopefully your balls have stopped killing you, we're going to talk.”
* * *
When Dempsey returned several minutes later carrying a bourbon, the color had returned to Koening's face. Dempsey took a sip and turned his gaze towards him.
“How do I know you're not bullshitting me, Troy?”
Dempsey laughed. “Paul, in all the years we've known each other, when have I ever bullshitted you? You know me, straight down the line. What I'm telling you is fact. You want to challenge that and take a risk, then you better start settling your affairs in this world.”
“Alright, alright…”
“Now, you were telling me about Richard Higgins and how he initially made contact with you. What was it, a phone call?”
Koening settled himself in his seat, his balls still aching. “No, that would have been normal practice, right. I got a knock on the door of my apartment late on a Saturday night, about eight months ago and who's standing there but the Assistant Director of Plans. Shit, I thought the Agency was going to reinstate me.”
“So what did he want, Paul? Obviously you're not back on the books. To come all this way to see you, it must have been important.”
“Yeah, well at the minute everybody seems to be travelling across country to see me,” said Koening. “He said that he was running an off-the-books op, something that was going to go down in Europe. They needed civilian personnel with no Agency connection. He said it made the op more secure that way.”
“And what did you think?”
“I thought it was crap. I mean, since when did the Agency need to search out assets and staff in Europe? They're swimming with guys who will do jobs for them over there. But hey, Higgins was offering two thousand dollars for an introduction and some names. I'd be crazy to turn it down!”
“So what did he want specifically, Paul?”
“He wanted off-the-books people, residents in their own country who could provide a discreet 'surveillance capability' – they're his words, not mine. He wanted the names and contact details of private investigators in several countries. Guys who could do a little digging and poking around, ex-cops, ex-security people, that kind of thing.”
“And you have these names?”
Koening nodded. “Sure, I'm part of a network of private investigators. We all swap numbers; you need a guy in Europe or the Middle East or Asia to do a little tracing or find a missing person, one of our guys will fit the bill.”
Dempsey pondered on that. “What countries was he specifically looking for?”
“Britain, France, Italy, bits of Germany, Switzerland.”
“Did he say why?”
“Nope, he didn't and I didn't ask. My own guess was to track some people, prior to pitching a recruitment offer. But in these crazy times, it could be anything.”
It could be some research on some future assets, thought Dempsey. Or some people, some potential Russian agents with a big red cross on their foreheads. Some targets, some dead targets.
“So what happens now?” asked Koening, keen to discover his fate at the hands of the big Texan.
“Now you're going to give me the contact details of your PI network in Europe and then you're going to drop those memories of yours into a big black hole and forget that this ever happened. You understand?”
Koening nodded. He knew when to play the game and when to leave. “One thing I learned from working down here, Troy, is that Miami is the place to bury secrets.
* * *
The next morning Troy Dempsey presented himself at the offices of the Melmar Corporation, which had a series of buildings on the campus of the University of Miami.
What Melmar actually did, nobody knew.
It was in fact, the Miami-based CIA station operating under the codename of JM/WAVE and was there to provide a base for the continuing operations against Cuba. For Dempsey, no
ne of that was of interest; he merely wanted a secure telephone and telex line so that he could pass back the information from Koening to Langley. He introduced himself to the Station's Comptroller and told him what he wanted. The office was small and quiet. Dempsey picked up a desk phone and punched in the number to Wellings' secure line at Langley.
“How's Miami?” asked Wellings.
“Swampy. Listen up, I got another piece of the jigsaw. I'm going to telex it through to the communications center, should be in about thirty minutes once I've figured out how this machine works.”
“Okay. I'll put in an immediate access request for when it arrives.”
“How about you? Anything turned up?”
Wellings sighed. “Nothing. I've spent the past few days searching through dozens and dozens of files that might turn something up. But as I'm not sure what I'm actually supposed to be looking for it's turning into a needle in a haystack situation.”
Dempsey sympathized. “We always knew it was going to be the fine details that would break this investigation open.”
“It doesn't help that Higgins' remit is to be a professional nosy-parker in other people's operations. I mean, that's what he's employed to do by the Director of Plans. Potentially, he could have accessed thousands of operations, everything from agent running, to technical, to defections. The list is endless.”
“Keep at it. He's not in it alone, there has to be a partner, maybe even two or three. That's what we want now, the next man along. The best advice I can give you until I return is to try to put yourself in the operational commander's shoes. How would you set this type of operation up; what would you need? Remember, they have access to pretty much all of the Agency's logistical contacts. How would you put in the plumbing?” said Dempsey.
They had the theory that Higgins was up to no good; something involving the death of a defector, an investigation into a shooting in Poland and a fictitious operation across Europe. Separately, they didn't add up to much. What they needed were the finer details about where it was going to lead them and bring all the threads together.
Chapter Seven
“I think we've found something,” said Wellings, recently returned from the Archives Section at Langley.
It was three days after Dempsey had returned from Miami and things were beginning to look bleak. He had the feeling that they were going around in circles. They needed a lucky break… and fast. “Okay, shoot – what you got for me?”
“How does an operation that never happened grab you? Operation KINO; a joint CIA and South Korean intelligence op from eight years ago. Its plan was to help infiltrate and then run a covert network in the North. According to what we have, it would have been run as a sabotage and insurrection task force in case the North decided to overrun the South.”
“Never heard of it,” shrugged Dempsey. “What happened to it?”
“Nothing, it never happened, that's what. The file says that it was an unacceptable risk and the project was killed dead before it went operational.”
Nothing new there then. If Dempsey had a buck for every time a feasible op had been spiked by the brass, he would be living the high life in the Bahamas.
Wellings continued. “Except this time all the operational planning was already in place. They had a field commander, assets in place, resources, you name it. Hell, the agents were virtually in the plane and ready to be parachuted in when it was cancelled. But that's not the most interesting point, not by a long shot. You want to know the name– sorry, the cover name, of the field controller involved in running it?”
Dempsey sat up straighter in his chair; suddenly the temperature in the room had risen by an alarming degree.
Wellings let him hang for a moment more. “The Field Commander's name was one Maurice Knight. Canadian businessman cover. Aged fifty and resident of Ontario.”
“Holy shit! You found him,” said Dempsey, punching the air and nearly spilling out of his chair.
Wellings was smiling. “It wasn't easy. Korean ops come under the Near East/South Asia Division, but for some reason, reasons I can now guess, the shelved op reports were hidden away in Void Liaison Operations.”
“So someone was trying to conceal a weak spot,” said Dempsey. While it wouldn't have been possible to totally destroy all evidence of an authenticated file, it certainly would have been possible to conceal it somewhere else. Somewhere where no one would think to look. Void Liaison Operations was the black hole of the CIA's filing system; the place where aborted operations went to decompose. “What made you look in those files? It was a one in a million chance surely?”
“It was simply a process of elimination. We'd looked everywhere else, and that was one of the few places left to cover. So you want to see who Mr. Maurice Knight was in real life?” said Wellings. He lifted up the file and presented it to Dempsey with all the flourish of a stage magician.
Dempsey pressed the file down with the flat of his palms and peered closely at the typewritten report. He scanned it and then breathed out a long slow breath. A moment of clarity hit him. All this time he was wrong! Higgins wasn't the prime operator, Higgins was the inside man, the feeder of information and the fixer of resources. He used CIA assets and logistics to further an illegal operation – an assassination operation – for his principal 'Mr. Maurice Knight'.
And Maurice Knight, according to the slip of paper that lay before him now, was the one time work name of former CIA officer Charles 'Chuck' Ferrera.
* * *
They were walking up the hill track, the stones and mud squelching beneath their feet. Not a bad day for a hike in the Vermont countryside, thought Dempsey. Crisp and clear. The kind of day he'd have enjoyed taking the dog for a half day walk on his vacation time.
“It's about a mile up ahead. The track rises steadily,” said Ralph Barr, Dempsey's guide, companion for the day and his latest informant in the search for the elusive Maurice Knight.
“Not a problem.” Dempsey had worn his old jungle boots, from his time in CBI. They were comfortable and asked nothing from him. In the jungles of Asia, he'd climbed and fought in all manner of hills and mountains, so a medium-sized hill in Vermont wasn't going to be too much of a challenge.
“So you've been picked to re-examine the murder of one of my old case officers. Jeez, I thought that investigation had been shelved years ago. Didn't someone already look at that and decide there wasn't enough information to carry on with it?” asked Barr.
Dempsey looked over at Barr. He was like a tough gnome; rambunctious, no nonsense and settled in his retirement. Despite all that, Dempsey knew he had a good reputation at the CIA for being one of the ablest desk officers in the Soviet Satellites Division. “Oh, you know the way it is. New DCI comes in and wants to straighten the whole place out on his first watch. Soldiers, like you and me, we just do as we're told.”
Barr grunted. “I suppose you've read up on the background to Black Orchestra?”
Dempsey nodded. He'd spent the past few days poring over everything in the files relating to the long term intelligence network that the CIA had worked so hard to maintain. He thought he had the gist of how it was run, what it had achieved and the theories of why it was blown. What he didn't have, was the information that never makes it into the files; the small details, the nuances and the hidden secrets.
“Then you know that as the network's Division Desk Officer, I had inherited a damned fine unit,” said Barr. “Great people, first class agents in Poland, superb support staff. I'd been attached to it when I first joined the Agency way back when, so after touring around behind the Iron Curtain I was thrilled when I was given command of Black Orchestra.”
They crunched along the path, Dempsey keeping a good pace, and Barr wheezing beside him. Barr caught his breath and continued. “The network had begun in 1946 with a bunch of former Nazi's and their informants. We'd turned them around and made them an offer; work for us or head for Nuremburg. Not surprisingly, they didn't fancy the thought of swinging from a rope
. Over the next few years, the original agents made their way in the Polish government and ended up acting as informal spotters and recruiters. Consequently, we were able to recruit a whole new stable of agents. Within the space of a year or two, Black Orchestra had grown from a mom and pop operation to the equivalent of a multi-national. We had agents inside the local parliaments, the military forces, even some in the intelligence services. It was a good network, we ran it well and the team was committed.”
“And then it all went wrong. Why?” asked Dempsey.
Barr shrugged. “Well, that's the million-dollar question in cases like these, isn't it? Who fucked up? Was it a deeper KGB conspiracy or had we been played all along? My gut tells me that it was something simple. No great conspiracy, no convoluted counter-espionage operation aimed against us. No, someone didn't follow something simple like security or counter-surveillance protocols and the whole network suffered because someone hadn't marked a lamppost or checked his back. After that, you catch one agent, stick him in the interrogation cells and he starts to talk, then you catch another two, three, until eventually some lucky Polish counter-intelligence officer has suddenly got himself a whole Western spy network in the bag.”
They reached a fork in the path and headed to the right, rising further upwards. In the distance, Dempsey could see the sun glinting off the icy peaks of a mountain. It was beautiful.
“And the shooting in Warsaw Zoo, where did that fit into the whole thing?” asked Dempsey.
Barr frowned at that. “That's the most infuriating thing, Troy. By our calculations, the majority of Black Orchestra had been rolled up by then. The agents had gone silent and we were left pretty much blind. My guess is that the KGB wanted a real live Western intelligence officer to parade in front of the world. The people running the roll up of the network wanted to have their cake and eat it, all at the same time. Unfortunately for us, Dan paid the ultimate price.”