The Coldest Warrior

by The Coldest Warrior (retail) (epub)

  GABRIEL GOT HOME late. He slipped into bed beside Claire, and they lay side by side in the warm evening heat.

  “What happened?”

  “He was hit on the head in the hotel room.”

  She rolled over on her elbow and looked in his face, startled out of her slumber. Gabriel met her eyes. “He was murdered.”

  They gazed at each other for a moment, surrounded by silence and the unsaid implications. “Let’s talk in the morning,” she said.

  He knew it was futile to sleep. His mind filled with the images of Wilson in the hotel room, and his imagination re-created the final moments of Wilson’s struggle and his fear as he fell nine floors. The images kept him awake.

  Finally, he heard Claire’s soft breathing and he knew she’d fallen asleep. He lay in the quiet room listening to crickets outside, and suddenly, in his imagination, he heard the sound of a man hitting the pavement. He sat bolt upright, as if a giant hand had reached down from the ceiling and pulled him up.

  Gabriel was trained to consider the unthinkable, but he found the facts hard to accept. Had the CIA killed one of its own? He calmly considered the possibility, testing it, rejecting it, considering it. But there it was—an immutable fact.

  What was a long-serving, high-ranking CIA officer to do with his belief? What in God’s name did a man loyal to his job and his colleagues, who believed in the Agency’s high purpose, do now? Should he ring alarm bells and play into the hands of its enemies? My God, you’ve gone off the reservation, he could hear the director say. And what was the motive? Questions needled him, the end of one became the beginning of another, and in time he exhausted himself. He lay back down in bed, eyes wide open.

  17

  A Secret Archive

  Gabriel met with John the next day. Following their established pattern, Gabriel was in his car near Lincoln Park when he heard the back door open.

  “This is our last meeting,” John said, breathless, as he closed the door.

  Later, when Gabriel was trying to figure out who John might be, he reflected on the changed tone in John’s voice in the moment. Something was different. He was abrupt and anxious.

  “Wilson was murdered,” Gabriel said.

  “Are you surprised?” John snapped. “You’re getting a lot of attention inside. You’ve made people nervous. It’s becoming dangerous for me to meet you. Someone suspects you’re getting help.”

  “Every murder needs a motive. Point me in a direction. Where do I look?”

  “Use your nose. Smell the lies. Weisenthal testified that Ainsley destroyed all the records, but Dora Plummer told you Ainsley brought 450 boxes to be processed. ‘Destroyed’ is very specific, but ‘processed’ implies a variety of outcomes.”

  So John was in the room when Weisenthal testified. Gabriel remembered the half-dozen intelligence officers he’d seen in the packed Senate hearing room, but he couldn’t place John among them.

  “What if you wanted to dispose of documents but didn’t want to destroy them because one day the incriminating evidence could become exculpatory—or used for blackmail? In the meantime, you want the files to be archived but not discoverable. What would you do? Where would you send them? There is only one place.”

  GABRIEL HAD ACCOMPLISHED one thing during his twenty minutes with the chief archivist at the National Archives. He had established where Record Group 263, the CIA’s archives, was held. The archivist refused Gabriel’s request to browse the stacks, but he’d gotten the talkative man to let him peek in, using the excuse that he was a fan of John Russell Pope, the building’s architect, and he was curious how the original interior courtyard design had become floors of stacks. While the archivist gave a commentary at the open door, eager to show off his knowledge, Gabriel’s sleight-of-hand fixed a two-inch swatch of duct tape over the heavy metal door’s spring latch bolt.

  Gabriel closed the metal door and stood absolutely still, glancing in both directions to be certain he was alone. In the event of some chance encounter, he was prepared to account for his presence, and he had an explanation ready for why he was in the off-limits stacks.

  Gabriel’s first sensation was the tomb-like quiet—no sounds from the outside world penetrated the windowless space, leaving only dense, velvet silence. The floor was illuminated by dim pendant ceiling lamps hanging at regular intervals. Beyond the circles of light there was only darkness. Pervading everything was a sense of warehoused documents—a vast historical record of a million incidents all locked in sealed containers, dead to the present except when a researcher, by reading the pages, brought them to life. Aisle after aisle met the long hallway at right angles, and the hallway disappeared in a distant vanishing point. There was none of the grandeur of an old library, only row after row of floor-to-ceiling steel shelving that bulged with fat cardboard boxes, thin green folios, and leather-bound books. A cold and charmless place.

  Gabriel now heard a very faint hum that he traced to the many dim electric lights. As he stood just inside the closed door, evaluating his next move, he became aware of footsteps nearby. The sound had no provenance in the muffled space, and he turned in one direction, then in the other, looking for someone approaching. Gabriel stepped into the nearest aisle, and not finding a place to hide, he climbed a ten-foot rolling stepladder, his head rising above the horizontal plane of light. The person paused to look up at the dark figure on the ladder, but then Gabriel heard the footsteps continue down the hallway. He waited until they were faint and distant.

  Gabriel took the stairs one flight down and found a section of the floor separated from the main area by a chain-link fence. There was a brightly lit table inside with boxes of files waiting to be returned to shelves. Here it was: the locked crypt of buried secrets stored in a forgotten catacomb.

  Gabriel pulled the keyed doorknob twice, rattling the cage, and found that someone had left it carelessly unlocked.

  Gabriel quickly discerned the logic of the filing system. Printed signs on aisle ends described record subgroups with inclusive dates for the shelved boxes and general descriptions: Berlin Tunnel, Bay of Pigs, National Intelligence Estimates, Iran, Guatemala, and the boxes on the shelves within the aisle were more particularly described—Vol. 3, Bk. 1, Confidential War Diaries, 1945. The pattern repeated itself through the one acre of storage. The card file for Record Group 263 had not indexed “Dr. Charles Wilson,” or even a vague reference to his work, which left Gabriel to browse the stacks. As he strolled through the aisles, glancing at the descriptions, hoping something would jump out, he quickly saw the challenge: 450 boxes or folios attributed to Ainsley, nine hundred linear feet of documents, over two million pages. The grim prospect tested even Gabriel’s determination.

  He sat on the step of a rolling ladder and pondered. He looked at his watch. He’d already been in the building an hour and he had no clue how to begin or even if his suspicions were correct. Doubt crept into his thinking. What in God’s name was he doing, believing he could solve this puzzle? A fool’s errand. John’s comment came back to him. What would you do? He thought: name a file with a label no one would ever connect to the actual content. The whereabouts of a deliberately miscataloged file would be known only to the man who mislabeled it. A simple deception. The idea settled in. Of course! People were lazy. Memory was lazy. Men picked passcodes that included their birthdate, or home address, or license plate number, because they were easy to remember. The real danger for the code maker was to create a passcode that was hard to remember and therefore easily forgotten.

  Gabriel stood. He gave himself another hour to test his hypothesis. He started at one end of the aisle and systematically scanned each box and folio for an idiosyncratic description. The unusual label, the odd description, and nothing so general that it would attract attention. He looked in several. There was a box titled “Pont St. Espirit,” another “81 Bedford Street,” and a third labeled “225 Chestnut Street, San Francisco.” But the contents had nothing to do with Wilson. Gabriel proceeded diligently, but w
hen the hour was up, he’d had no success.

  Gabriel sat down on a chair by the table that held boxes waiting to be returned to the shelves. He wasn’t ready to give up, but he saw no path forward. He thought about Wilson as he sat there in the vast collection of secret history. He owed Wilson his life, but his debt wasn’t open-ended, and perhaps he’d come to a reasonable conclusion.

  Gabriel saw that his shoelace was untied. As he bent over, Wilson’s face appeared in his mind’s eye, an image so startlingly real, so vivid, that it took his breath away, and in that moment he had the very real sensation that he was on his back on a gurney being taken down the tunnel under Building 470, passing under bright ceiling lights. Between the intervals of blinding lamps, he saw Wilson’s ghostlike apparition urging Gabriel to keep his eyes open, coaxing, demanding, berating. But Wilson’s voice was silent, his lips moving soundlessly. And suddenly Gabriel heard Wilson’s voice boom loudly: Don’t close your eyes. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.

  Premonitions are strange things. So are feelings, and so are impulses. And the three combined into one for Gabriel at that moment. He had finished tying his shoe when he suddenly looked up, following the voice, and on the table in front of him there was a green folio labeled, “dei opus est scriptor.” Where had he seen that phrase? Then he remembered: Ainsley had said it in their phone conversation. The Latin words, and their connection to the Knights of Malta, had stuck with Gabriel.

  Gabriel opened the folio. He lifted one document, put it down, lifted another, and in a moment realized it was a treasure trove of Wilson’s missing records, things he’d been told were lost: fitness reports, letters of commendations, numerically scored personnel evaluations, and Wilson’s unredacted psychiatric evaluation with the doctor’s name. And there were also Wilson’s trip reports and summaries of covert weapons projects that he had managed. Gabriel felt the nerves on the back of his neck tingle. Patience, rigorous attention to detail, an intelligent approach to a problem. These were essential for a good case officer. But Gabriel also knew that stubborn assignments didn’t succeed unless there was also luck involved, and this was his lucky break.

  Gabriel saw the folio was among cardboard boxes that were waiting to be returned to the shelves. Someone had recently retrieved the folio, Gabriel thought. Someone else knew the code.

  Gabriel read the documents hungrily, scanning one and moving to the next, letting information on the pages form a picture of Wilson’s work. He was halfway through the folio when he stopped. A memo from November 12, 1953, with the subject line “re: Security Violations” was addressed to Phillip Treacher from Herbert Weisenthal. Someone had written in the margin, “Trips to Berlin?” Gabriel recalled Treacher’s emphatic denial he’d worked with Weisenthal.

  Gabriel looked up and listened. Loud cries came from somewhere in the vast stacks, and in the quiet of his mind he knew that someone had found the duct-taped door and had put out an alarm. There were excited sounds of people running everywhere, shouting.

  Gabriel placed the inch-thick file next to his stomach, and he drew his shirt closed, making sure the file was under his belt and unseen. He calmly walked out of the cage and pulled the door closed, locking it. He knew that security guards were now involved. A breach of the inner sanctum would draw a quick police response to protect stored originals of the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.

  There was no place to hide. Voices were coming from the floor above, where the door had been found forced open, so Gabriel took the stairs down one flight. He walked down another flight, stepping quickly, hearing the gathering yells. The voices, which had been distant, were closer now, and there were too many to count.

  Gabriel spun around, unable to find a place to hide, and saw an exit door: “Emergency Use Only.” There was a fire extinguisher on the wall next to the door and above it, at eye level, a manual fire alarm, with the instruction “Pull Down.” He broke the glass and yanked the handle, and the stacks filled with fierce, high-pitched sounds and pulsing strobe lights.

  Gabriel slowly leaned against the security bar, opening the emergency exit, and he carefully pulled the door closed. He found himself in a hallway on the main floor of the building. It was a chaotic scene. Staff ran in different directions, hustling tourists toward the building’s main entrance, and security guards led stunned researchers from the main reading room, most clutching papers. Gabriel joined the exodus.

  Chaos was everywhere in the rotunda, and the building’s population evacuated through the tall bronze doors. Gabriel saw a video surveillance camera peering down, but he ignored it. In the unlikely event his face was identified among the many people being evacuated, he would say he’d been with the chief archivist. He passed two security guards at the door, but they were uninterested in a well-dressed man offering up a look into his attaché case. Gabriel joined the crowd outside, who looked up at the magnificent Corinthian columns, gaping in disbelief, looking for the fire.

  Gabriel slipped into his parked Volvo two blocks away. He removed the documents and placed them on the passenger seat. As he pulled into traffic, his mind was already beginning to frame the first paragraph of the report he would write.

  18

  Langley Headquarters

  He’ll be right in.” The director’s secretary held open the door, guiding Gabriel into the small conference room. Nothing in the room had changed since his last visit. The portrait gallery of former DCIs was the same, the spot on the wall reserved for the current occupant was still empty, the brace of flags on either side of the thirty-eighth president’s photograph hung limply, and there was still no air-conditioning and no sense of day or night behind the drawn curtains. Nothing had changed, but Gabriel knew from the late hour, and the sudden request to meet, that something was different.

  “Jack,” the director greeted. “Sit, sit.” They took seats across the table from each other. The director clasped his hands prayerfully and got to the point.

  “Wilson,” he said. “It’s late, I know. Time gets away from me. Where are we?”

  Gabriel had put the final touches on his report that morning, and while pieces were still missing, he had enough to make his case. It was done. As done as he could make it.

  “We keep great volumes on things we do,” Gabriel began. “We have many cubic feet of files on the Berlin Tunnel and the Bay of Pigs, but until yesterday we had very little on Wilson.” He handed the director a manila folder with the fifty-four documents the Agency had given the family, and he included the Notification of Personnel Action that described Wilson’s quiet transfer to the Agency. The documents were the thickness of a no. 2 lead pencil. “This is everything we gave the family, and missing, of course, are the documents that Weisenthal destroyed. We don’t know what was in those documents. I discovered Wilson’s personnel records in the National Archive, where they had been miscataloged—wrongly labeled.” Gabriel paused. “I stumbled upon them. They were on a table waiting to be put back on the stacks.”

  The director didn’t show any reaction. “You got lucky. The magic of chance.”

  “Perhaps. But it begs the question: Are there more files that I haven’t found?”

  Gabriel suspected the director wouldn’t know the answer, but he would understand the question. Questions were more helpful than answers—which, by their nature, were often incomplete or unreliable. Questions were open-ended, rich with possibility. Answers closed down inquiries.

  Gabriel presented Wilson’s psychiatric evaluation. “This is an example of what I found—obviously a fake file concocted to keep an investigator from discerning the facts of the incident. It’s dated January 5, 1953, but that’s an obvious typo. It should be January 5, 1954. You can see the forgery in the carelessness. It describes Wilson as suffering from depression and being a risk to himself. I tried to track down the doctor, but there is no record of him. No medical license, no address, no hospital affiliations. It makes sense if you see it as a cover-up. And there are no names—except for Weisenthal
and Ainsley—associated with the chain of custody of the documents. Follow the fingerprints is the usual game, but where the prints vanish, the trail ends. Documents were destroyed, or intentionally miscataloged, and others may be lost for good. All support the intended impression that Wilson committed suicide.”

  Gabriel paused to let his conclusion settle in. “But he didn’t kill himself. He was murdered. He was struck in the head, stunned, and dropped from the hotel window.”

  “Motive?” the director asked.

  “I’ll get to that.”

  Suddenly, the door opened and the director’s secretary interrupted. “They’re here.”

  “I’ve asked James Coffin and George Mueller to join us,” the director said. “I want them to hear this.”

  Coffin sat on one side of the director, while Mueller sat on the other. All three were opposite him with the same drawn expressions, the same tolerant skepticism, the same studied silence. Gabriel thought, Something has changed.

  He pushed his report across the table, and he took the carbon copy that he had reserved for himself and slid it to Coffin. Gabriel had typed the report himself on his Remington manual. “There are only two copies.”

  The director shared his copy with Mueller. “Let’s proceed.”

  Gabriel had assembled a chronology of the events from 1949 to 1953 and added a narrative that linked known facts, filling out what was known about Wilson’s death with information he’d found in the miscataloged personnel file, shaping a theory. He had written the ten, single-space pages in careful, spare prose—a dry report except in its explosive subject, stamped: EYES ONLY.