He remembered it was November because it happened just before his eighth birthday, which was November 28. He had been asleep in his room when sudden, loud banging downstairs jolted him awake.
He jerked himself upright when he heard loud men’s voices shouting “FBI! FBI! Hands where I can see them!” Then his mother’s voice, screaming from her bedroom—the sound of her feet in the hallway—and then his door bursting open and she rushing to him in her nightgown, her eyes wild, shouting “Avis! Avis honey! Come to me!” and grabbing him and hugging him, so tight he could not breathe, while blue lights flashed outside his window and other lights flared outside his room and heavy feet pounded up the stairs—
—and then two big men in dark suits and hats spun around the doorway into the room, crouching low and pointing guns right at them and yelling “FBI! DON’T MOVE! GET THOSE HANDS UP!”—and his mother squeezing him and saying in his ears, over and over, “It’s all right baby, I won’t let them hurt you, don’t be afraid Avis, it will be all right dear”—and then one of them grabbing her arms and trying to pull her away from him as she screamed “NOOOO!” while the other grabbed him and yanked him in the other direction, and he felt like his bones were breaking and he screamed and then the man jerked him away from her and down onto the bed—
—and then he saw his mother being shoved to the floor, and the other man jumping on her back, and then his terror turned to rage—and howling he flung himself at the man above him and started hitting and clawing and biting like a wild animal, until his teeth found the man’s hand, the one without the gun, and he clamped down hard and the man yelled “AHHH!” and then his other hand, the one with the gun, came whipping around and crashed into his head and he knew nothing more . . .
The night that John and Eileen Tremills were arrested by the FBI, Avis was only eight years old.
Only when he was much older was he able to process what had happened. He learned that his father had never left the Communist Party, but had been groomed by Party officials for recruitment into a Soviet espionage ring. On those wonderful weekend family excursions to the rustic, innocuous-looking camp in the Adirondacks, he was actually being trained by KGB handlers there to become a courier, “talent scout,” and recruiter. With his engineering background, John Tremills was assigned to a cell in the New York City area tasked with stealing highly classified technological developments from university and defense contractors.
His parents’ were held without bail. That period, and the subsequent espionage trial, lasted two years, during which time Avis was sent to live with his mother’s divorced sister and her daughter. It was an endless period of further terror and fury for the child. He did not understand what had happened, or why, and no adult wished to explain it, or tried to. Later, he understood: How could one explain arrests and trials for espionage and treason to a small boy? He knew only that the two people he loved and depended upon most in the world had been violently ripped away from him, overnight, leaving him scared and angry and alone—and that the men who had committed this terrifying act were from the government.
He did not see his parents again for those two interminable years. He learned later that he would have been permitted visits, once a month, to the prison where they were held—but that they had not wanted him to see them there, behind walls and barbed wire and a thick plastic window, where he would talk to them on a phone with armed guards hovering nearby. They thought it would be worse for him, that their sensitive child had already experienced enough trauma.
Or perhaps not. During those two years living with his divorced aunt, Avis was an alien in a new neighborhood, a new school. He felt completely isolated. He could not focus on anything but the haunting memories of what had happened, memories that caused him to wake up screaming. His school grades suffered terribly, and he lost the grade level he had been advanced to. Counseling did little good; no one then understood PTSD, especially in a child.
And through it all, he had to endure the malicious hostility and bullying and insults of his peers and classmates, chants of Communist and Traitor—words spat with blind hatred, but whose meaning neither they nor he could begin to grasp.
At the end of the two years, John Avery Tremills was convicted for espionage and sentenced to life in a federal prison. Eileen was acquitted for lack of sufficient evidence of direct knowledge and complicity. Avis was ten years old when she came back to him. That day, they cried for hours in each other’s arms on his little bed in his aunt’s house. His mother rocked him, petting his hair, trying and failing to explain why all this had happened to them.
And why his beloved father would never be coming home to them.
For the next two years, things only got worse.
No school would hire Eileen. Nor would any decent-paying company. Though highly intelligent and educated, she was reduced to taking the most degrading and menial of jobs, at places where no one asked many questions about one’s background. After a few months, her own sister could not take the pressure of her indignant neighbors, and they could no longer stay with her. They were forced to move into a two-room dump of an apartment in a run-down neighborhood. They lived off what little income Eileen could earn working long hours as a maid in cheap motels, or folding clothes in a laundromat—supplemented by the charity of her sister and a local Unitarian church.
Avis watched his mother deteriorate from a lovely, lively, educated woman, into a lonely, embittered woman aging rapidly before her time. Her anger toward the United States government was boundless, endless—and of course he absorbed it without question. Her rants confirmed his experience of that horrifying night and the hideous years since.
They had locked his father away in a cage forever. They had reduced his mother and himself to an animal existence.
In time, he no longer experienced the bottomless fear.
In time, the fear became a towering rage.
Avis Tremills was twelve years when he made a vow to himself.
He made the vow when he heard his mother, behind the closed door of the bathroom in their shabby little apartment, sobbing uncontrollably.
He stood outside the door, fists clenched, shaking. And in that moment, he made the silent vow.
He did not know when, or how, he would make good on the promise. But he knew then that he now had a mission that would define the rest of his life.
The mission was revenge.
He closed his eyes and made the vow.
The goddamned United States of America will pay for this.
Only one thing kept Eileen Tremills from hitting rock bottom—from turning to drugs, alcohol, or prostitution. That was her brilliant, beautiful boy. If there was only one thing she could salvage from this nightmare, it would be her Avis.
But to do that, she decided, he needed to be severed from any association with the widely hated name Tremills. In the McCarthyite Era, that name had become the modern equivalent of the Scarlet Letter. It would only taint her boy’s future, denying him the opportunities that his genius merited.
So, just before he turned thirteen, she scraped together the money to file the papers to have his name legally changed. They chose his new name together. In honor of his father, he chose his middle name, Avery, to be his own first name. At his mother’s request, her maiden name, Rogers, became his middle name. And Trammel was an alteration of Tremills—with the added symbolism that it meant harnessed or shackled, an enduring reminder of their family’s oppression by the fascist federal government.
Having shielded him from further persecution with the new name, she enrolled Avery into a new school, too, several miles away, where no one knew of his past.
Burning with a fierce new purpose, Avery Rogers Trammel made the most of the opportunity.
He tackled his schoolwork with missionary zeal. His talents, long lying fallow, once again took root and blossomed. He soon proved himself a brilliant and eager student. Encouraged by his mother’s doting, and weekly letters of encouragement from his imprisoned father, A
very performed spectacularly. By the end of his first year, he stood academically at the head of his class. And never lost that standing.
He graduated the class valedictorian. His speech was a daring call for his peers to go out into the world and fight for social justice.
He mailed a copy, and a photo of himself in cap and gown, to his father—who still could not bear to have him come and visit in person. He received a tear-stained reply a week later, which he kept inside a growing scrapbook.
Days after his June graduation, Avery traveled into New York City and tracked down a name he found in one of the newspaper accounts of his parents’ trial. The man had been implicated in the espionage ring, but never charged, for lack of evidence. After a long conversation to convince him of his identity, he was given only a phone number. The phone number, which he dialed from a public booth in a drugstore, led to a brief meeting in Central Park. That meeting led to three more, in different places, with different individuals, over the course of a week. A message left inside a locker at Penn Station dispatched him to Washington, and yet another meeting in the rear corner booth of a busy steakhouse.
After a month of careful vetting, Avery Trammel found himself recruited by the KGB and assigned a handler. He did all this without telling his parents. After their ordeal, they would have been worried sick and warned him off.
In exchange for his future services, Avery insisted to his handler that his mother, who had suffered so much for her loyalty, deserved some help. His handler forwarded the request to the Center, which approved a modest stipend, routed circuitously to Avery. He gave it all to his mother, telling her he had gotten a part-time job. That, coupled with her own meager income, allowed her to move into a better apartment in a different town.
Trammel’s academic excellence had won him a number of scholarship offers. He selected George Washington University School of Government, Business, and International Affairs, in Washington, D.C. It was another major stepping stone to his objective.
It was the 1960s, a time of revolutionary fervor and upheaval. His handler warned him to keep a low profile. He was to be a “sleeper,” an illegal slated for long-term training and development. He spent vacation time traveling to safe houses and rural sites where he could be trained. But hot-headed and angry, Trammel was impatient. Behind the back of the Center, he began associating with campus Maoist revolutionaries. Over the next two years, he participated in disruptive street protests. Later, he secretly joined a violent underground cell. He became involved in their campaign of bombings, until an FBI informant exposed their plot to bomb the Pentagon. Trammel and two members of his cell narrowly escaped discovery and capture.
At that point, Trammel realized that while he had been venting years of pent-up anger, he had been making little progress toward fulfilling his mission. He could remain a revolutionary insurgent, or choose to play the long game with the Russians. He pondered which course was most likely to wreak the greatest havoc.
He chose the Russians.
Avery Trammel studied both business and government, eventually graduating summa cum laude. He then pursued his Master’s, again graduating near the top of his class.
Over the next fifteen years, he began his climb up the ladder of wealth and power, aided each step of the way by Moscow. They had realized his enormous potential at the outset, and invested heavily to help him become the consummate “agent of influence”: an operator at the highest echelons of American business, government, and society. He possessed advanced degrees in international finance and government, formidable intellectual powers, unshakable self-confidence, and relentless drive. To all this the Center provided timely infusions of substantial investment cash, and strategic assistance in international currency manipulations. Trammel’s rise was meteoric. Moscow backed him just as they had other prominent financiers over the decades, directing these agents into critical positions of influence and decision-making.
Until 1989. The disastrous collapse of the Soviet Union and the cause of international communism left Trammel without his support system. However, he had long been disenchanted with Soviet corruption, and, in truth, with communism. Besides, deep down, Marxism had never been his core motivation—only the intellectual rationalization for his festering hatred.
That is when he made his next strategic decision. As the Soviet Union began to reconstitute itself as an imperial oligarchy, Trammel decided that he would continue to avail himself of their resources—but for his own personal objectives. With Russian money, he would build a network of cultural and political advocacy foundations and groups, then employ them to manipulate American politics and policy. With Moscow’s cooperation, his network would pursue the strategic, long-term goal of installing a puppet in the White House.
But at the right moment, the Kremlin would realize that the puppet was not theirs.
In the end, the puppet would dance to the strings held by Avery Rogers Trammel.
3
Careful to preserve the fragile pages, Trammel closed the photo album, then the scrapbook. He stacked them inside the metal box, then returned it to the safe inside his desk.
He remained kneeling there, understanding why he had to revisit these reminders of his past today. It was the same reason that had driven him from the meeting.
At age sixty-four, this year would likely be his final opportunity to fulfill his vow to his parents. Yet his mission now stood in grave peril.
For lack of character, Ashton Conn had failed him. For lack of substance, Carl Spencer was destined to fail, too. The man could not possibly compete against Roger Helm.
Yet Spencer could not be permitted to fail. Nor could he allow himself to fail to keep his solemn promise. Not after having come this close to succeeding.
He had revisited these mementos to steel himself for the grave thing he was preparing to do. The odds of succeeding, he knew, were not high. But they were far higher than inaction.
His hand groped for the old silver watch in his pocket. It had belonged to his father, who had sent it to him the day he went on trial. It had not kept time for decades. But during the childhood period when he was alone, it was the only thing that had kept him sane. And ever since, the timepiece buttressed his resolve during times of difficulty.
This was such a moment.
He drew it from his pocket now, turning it over to read the faded but still legible inscription etched onto its back. It was a famous phrase from Virgil’s Aeneid—his father’s favorite quotation—and beneath it, John Tremills’s own initials:
Audentis Fortuna Iuvat
J.A.T.
“Fortune favors the bold,” he whispered.
Seeing it, saying it, gave Avery Trammel the strength to reach into the safe for the satellite phone.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Located next to the Central Library, the baseball field at Quincy Park in Arlington, Virginia, was not a large venue for a presidential candidate’s outdoor event. It wouldn’t have been adequate later in the campaign season, when crowds would get much larger. But it was sufficient at this stage of the primary season.
Besides, this was not officially a campaign event. Roger Helm had first agreed to show up months earlier, because the locals wanted to honor him for his years generously supporting northern Virginia youth baseball leagues. When his campaign manager, “Cap” Moyer, tried to have the event double as a campaign rally, Helm exploded, saying that would “politicize” the award and “dragoon innocent children” into his campaign. It took phone calls from league officials and coaches to persuade him, reluctantly, to attend, but he agreed only on condition that there would be no political speeches, local politicians, or campaign signs present.
The Secret Service disliked outdoor events, and they hated this particular venue, especially in the wake of the terrorist attacks. With limited manpower, they had too large a periphery to control. Quincy Park was surrounded on all sides by roadways. The nearest to the ball field was North Quincy Street to the west; it ran parallel to the first
base line, not sixty feet from home plate, where the ceremony would take place. In addition, only a few sections of the ball field and park were fenced in.
But the protective detail worried most about the many massive, high-rise apartment buildings along Fairfax Drive, barely four hundred meters to the south. Hundreds of windows and balconies overlooked the library and had a clear view into the ball field beyond.
Preparations began the night before, when agents and local police cleared the park, then trucked in and erected metal barriers around the periphery, to funnel the crowd through metal detectors. They suspended tarps on the backstop and nearby fences to block rear and side views of the candidate. A truck arrived to empty the recycling bins in the small parking lot behind the backstop, and the bins were then padlocked shut. That was where the Helm motorcade would arrive, and it now was limited to Secret Service and police vehicles. His close protection personal security detail would escort him directly from his armored SUV into the field, then take up positions near him during the ceremony.
At nine a.m. on Saturday, police closed the surrounding streets, diverting traffic. Those wishing to attend the event would have to park in nearby lots and walk to the field. Meanwhile, the candidate had personally donated ten thousand dollars to the Arlington Central Library to remain closed until after the event. Police cars and officers were stationed at close intervals along the roadway sidewalks. A second line was stationed inside the ball field, along the outfield fence and the newly erected barriers, to keep the gathering crowd flowing toward the metal detectors. A bomb-sniffing dog then checked out the team dugouts, and the nearby vehicles and recycling bins.
In addition, the Secret Service posted agents to watch the apartment complex just across North Quincy Street, plus two counter-sniper teams atop one of the buildings there—one to watch the ball field, the other the buildings on North Nelson Street, which ran along the opposite side of the park to the east. To the south, they stationed two more counter-sniper teams on the roof of a ten-story office building on the north side of Fairfax Drive. Their mission was to scan all those apartment windows and balconies rising above them on the opposite side of the street.
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