The Coldest Warrior

by The Coldest Warrior (retail) (epub)

  “I don’t need to know everything. But I don’t know anything.”

  Sara’s eyes reddened, and she folded her arms on her chest. She glared at him and said nothing. He resisted an urge to comfort her, knowing that she would reject his offer. Why is this so hard? The moment of his testing had come.

  “I ended one life to save another,” he began. His memory was a kinescope of bloody images that came in chaotic succession—a crowded street in Cholon filled with black-pajama-clad Viet Cong advancing on Gabriel and his wounded ARVN colleague after a firefight left them behind enemy lines. Heavy enemy fire had left dead on the street, and Gabriel surprised a Viet Cong when he pulled the wounded ARVN officer into a shop doorway. Two armed men surprising each other, but Gabriel was the better trained, the more frightened, and he was the first to raise his pistol and fire.

  Something happened between father and daughter as Gabriel spoke, and in the pauses between words where the mind shaped thoughts, the unintentional happened. He got her attention. His willingness to speak brought them together and opened an intimate window onto the dark shadings of his work. He finished his account, and they were joined in an extraordinary silence.

  Gabriel gave his wife and daughter the queen bed, and he took the sofa. He had turned off the lights and stood bedside, looking down at Sara, who’d pulled the covers up to her chin. Their eyes met, and she blushed. “What?” she said.

  “Nothing.” He kissed her forehead. “Good night.”

  NO ONE SLEPT well in the unfamiliar room, and Gabriel had suffered doubly on the lumpy sofa. Phantoms had come to him during the night, and his mind tried to expel the faces of men and women whose lives were shattered in the safe house’s adjoining rooms. His dreams were a montage of desperate, crying men taken down by a weakness for sex or money, and the horrified faces came like jerky newsreel footage in a darkened theater, causing him to turn restlessly, covering his head with a pillow to escape the haunting images.

  He freed his mind by making lists, but the lists were always unsettling and always the same: anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, Q fever, Venezuelan equine encephalitis fever, enterotoxin B. Wilson’s bacteriological agents came as words and then became the disfigured Korean victims of the deadly toxins. In fitful sleep that wasn’t sleep at all, he came to understand what he needed to do.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Gabriel stood in the telephone booth at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fifteenth Street, across from the Ellipse, gazing at the White House, and then, when he’d overcome his hesitation, he deposited the coins. He dialed the emergency number John had given him. A woman’s voice came on the line.

  “I need to speak to the man who this number belongs to.”

  Gabriel heard a muffled conversation through the line’s static, and he knew she’d placed her palm on the phone.

  “Who is this?” a man said.

  “Jack Gabriel.”

  There was a long pause.

  “You aren’t to call this number.”

  Gabriel heard the man’s voice deepen in an effort to disguise himself. “This is an emergency,” Gabriel snapped.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Weisenthal was murdered. They are looking for me. I need to get out of the country.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  Gabriel stared at the receiver in his hand, and he had the sudden realization that he was talking to his adversary.

  “Look,” John said, backtracking, “maybe I can help. Where are you? I can have a car meet you and drive you south. I have contacts in Florida.”

  Gabriel stared at the telephone in his clenched hand. He slammed the handset into its cradle. Fuck.

  Gabriel took a deep breath, and then he took another. He tried to wrap his mind around the treachery that had been used against him. Remorseless anger welled up in his chest, but he let it dissipate. It was no good to get angry. Nothing good came from indulging his anger. He stared at the White House, and his mind settled on a plan. He remembered how he had been hounded by Ostroff to meet, and when he’d finally gone to his office, the boastful reporter had pointed out his front-page scoops taped to the wall. One six-column headline had broken the news of the CIA’s illegal domestic spying and the other broke the Wilson LSD story. He’d disdained his competition at the Washington Post. Gabriel remembered Ostroff’s rant. You guys don’t understand we are a country mordantly curious about the CIA—the assassinations, human drug experiments, moles. What the hell happened to Wilson? You’ll tell me over lunch. I don’t talk to the press. You’re talking now.

  Gabriel dialed the reporter’s number from memory and got voicemail. “It’s Jack Gabriel again. I have a story for you. I will call back in two hours.”

  GABRIEL ANNOUNCED HIS plan to Claire and Sara in the Hotel Harrington’s coffee shop. They were not hungry, but eating was a ritual, and rituals helped make life easier. They had arrived at the coffee shop at 10:30 a.m. It was empty at that hour because tourists had already left for the city’s attractions, eager to start their sightseeing. Warning signs had gone up in the lobby that Hurricane Eloise would arrive that evening. Gabriel sat across from Claire and Sara, sullen and slumped in her seat, fingers turning a loose silver bracelet around and around her wrist.

  Claire waved off the waiter offering a menu. “Just coffee.”

  “That’s perfectly okay, dearie. I’ll be right back.” The waiter sashayed off.

  Sara leaned across the table and lowered her voice. “We don’t know him. Why does he find it necessary to be so familiar?”

  Claire looked at Gabriel. “What did you come up with?”

  He explained the first part of the plan he had developed in the hours since rising at dawn. He had left the hotel room at 8:00 a.m. and found a nearby travel agency that opened early. “The hurricane arrives early tonight. Flights will be canceled for two days, maybe three. No one knows how bad it will be.” He handed Claire black-market Canadian passports for herself and Sara and an envelope.

  “Here are your plane tickets and the rest of the money. Your flight leaves at four p.m. this afternoon from National to San Juan, and you’ll make a connection to Martinique. I’ll follow when I can.”

  He explained that by now Metropolitan Police and FBI would be casting a wide net for him. Their home had been broken into, his telephone bugged, and he was being implicated in two suspicious deaths. Their town house would be seized, bank accounts frozen, communications with relatives monitored. Their life as they had known it was shattered, and now they had to think about their safety. A sailboat, if that is what they would live on, would cost more money. “Do you understand?”

  “No. I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “You need to travel today. You’ll fly to the Caribbean.” He saw Claire’s frightened eyes receive his suggestion and weigh its implications. Gabriel leaned forward. “But there’s one thing I need you to do before you leave. It is very important.”

  “Ready?” the waiter asked. He held his carafe poised to pour.

  Sara covered her cup with her hand.

  “Okeydokey, dearie. And you?”

  Gabriel tapped his cup’s lip, and the waiter chatted as he poured. “It’s going to rain today. Take your umbrellas. Hurricane Eloise is on her way. Big storm. Best to stay indoors or go to the Smithsonian. They have a fabulous Native American exhibit.” He looked at Claire. “And for you, dearie?”

  Gabriel produced a sheet of hotel stationery when the waiter was out of earshot, and he pushed the written instructions across to Claire.

  “We will need a lot of money,” he said. “Money to buy a sailboat and live for a long time.”

  He explained that he had access to a restricted account at Riggs Bank a few blocks away. She would visit the bank after breakfast and wire funds to a foreign bank account that they would access from Martinique. The paper in front of Claire had two columns, one titled “Riggs Bank” and the other “Bank of Commerce and Credit International,” and under each column, in correspondin
g rows, there were account numbers, account passwords, bank addresses, and three answers to questions that validated a unique identity.

  “Memorize these.”

  He told her the name of the bank manager to ask for, how to conduct herself, and that she would be requesting funds in one numbered account be electronically transferred to a second numbered account, making the transfer untraceable.

  “How much?” Claire asked.

  “Ten million dollars.”

  Sara looked up from her bracelet. “That’ll pay for breakfast.”

  “Where’s the money coming from?” Claire asked.

  “Dirty money. No one will report it missing because officially it doesn’t exist.”

  Claire was skeptical. “And you?”

  “I’ll be fine.” His face was resolute. “I have to finish what was started.”

  She paused. “When will you join us?”

  “When the airports reopen.”

  Claire saw resolve in his face. “You’re a lost, bleating voice,” she said. “A goddamned bleating voice.” Her eyes moistened, but she smiled through her tears. “Don’t die on us.”

  Gabriel wrote down the phone number of a telephone booth. “Call this number at one thirty p.m. when the wire is done. I will answer. Let’s pack.”

  As they made to leave, an unmarked black van pulled up just outside the plate glass window. Both van doors opened, and heavily armed SWAT agents jumped out. Each of the six men had “FBI” emblazoned in yellow on his bulletproof vest, and they were weighed down with black Kevlar helmets, utility belts, and UZI assault rifles. Electronic crackle from open mics, labored grunts, and the slap of boot leather punctuated the coffee shop’s quiet. Two teams of three each rushed through the hotel’s revolving doors and took up positions in the lobby, startling one woman, a jogger, who’d just stepped out of the elevator.

  Gabriel looked at Sara, knowing he’d forgotten to warn her. “Did you turn on the television this morning?” More than once he had watched the room through the closed-circuit monitoring lens embedded in the screen.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Gabriel rose slowly and took the rucksack at his feet. He directed Claire and Sara toward the kitchen’s swinging doors. “Don’t run. Look casual.” His voice had the same calm urgency that he’d used to guide the family to safety in Saigon.

  The waiter appeared at the kitchen door and stepped aside to let the family pass. “Take your umbrellas,” he said tartly.

  Gabriel nodded at the startled short-order cook who looked up from the flaming grill, but Claire looked right past the white-hatted chef.

  Gabriel had already pressed the freight elevator’s call button when he heard excited voices through the kitchen door. He heard a volley of angry threats and the brusque exasperation of men challenged by a witness who didn’t speak English. Gabriel punched the call button twice more, but his impatience had no effect on the elevator cab’s slow descent from an upper floor. Without pausing, he kicked the exit’s self-locking door, sending it wide open onto a courtyard of dumpsters.

  “Follow me.” He pointed at a narrow alley. His mind was a tuning fork to danger, primed and calibrating the deceptions of their escape. “Listen,” he said when they were at the street. His face was gray with worry. They would proceed as planned, he said. Nothing had changed. But even as he spoke, he felt his confidence weaken, and in the primitive part of his brain where inchoate thoughts form, he knew their prospects had dimmed.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Gabriel stood under an angry sky across Pennsylvania Avenue from Riggs Bank’s stately façade and watched his wife and daughter dodge traffic, making their way toward the bank’s stone columns. He waited until they were safely across and then stepped into the public telephone booth that faced the Ellipse. He lifted the receiver and felt an old fear tightened his chest.

  Metamorphosis is a painful process for a deep-thinking deskman who wields power with the stroke of a pen, and deep inside he was conscious of a carapace cracking open like the caterpillar turning out of its skin, shedding caution to become a man on the run. Old instincts returned, and once again he was a solitary case officer, registering danger, alert to surveillance, ready with his gun. For the first time since he had settled on his plan, he understood how reckless it was.

  Gabriel punched in the telephone number of the Times’ office and got Ostroff on the third ring. He had rehearsed how he would broach his topic, but noise on the street and Ostroff’s unpredictable nature conspired against what he had planned to say, so he got right to the point, and suddenly there were Ostroff’s rapid-fire questions, punctuated with obscenities. Gabriel gave an answer, and in the silence that followed, he knew the hook was planted.

  “Which entrance?” Ostroff asked. “There are two. What’s in it for me?”

  Gabriel exploited the reporter’s competitive nature. “For you? An exclusive. A front-page trophy to hang on your wall. You’ll finally make it across the East River to the Emerald City.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Charm school answer,” Gabriel said.

  “Double fuck you. What’s in it for me?”

  “They’ll turn the book you write into a movie. You’ll get on late-night television and show off your pleasant personality.” He paused. “Should I take it to the Post—”

  “I need something to convince a skeptical editor.”

  Gabriel heard silence on the other end of the line, and in the silence he heard what he expected—the telltale electronic signature of a wiretap. “I have a document that dots the ‘i’s and crosses the ‘t’s. A dead man’s parting gift. Names you’ll recognize. Evil will combust when you shine light on it.”

  There was a pause. “It better be that good.”

  “Six p.m. tonight. Take an umbrella.”

  “Which station?”

  “Connecticut Avenue.”

  “It hasn’t opened yet.”

  “You can duck under the barrier. I did it yesterday. It’s near you. No one will be out in the storm except you and me.”

  And the men listening to the conversation. “Names” would get the attention of the men Gabriel wanted. A lie, to be believable, only had to offer the possibility of truth.

  25

  Riggs Bank

  Pennsylvania Avenue

  Claire chose a teller window served by a woman with a pleasant face, thinking that speaking to a woman would give her confidence. She stepped up to the brass grill. She wore a large floppy hat and dark glasses that she’d bought in the pharmacy, hoping for a good disguise, but now they felt awkward.

  “How can I help you?” The woman smiled politely.

  Claire removed her glasses. “Good morning.” Be natural. “Terrible weather.” She smiled. “I need to initiate a wire transfer.” She pushed a completed bank transfer form under the grill. “I thought you might close early with the hurricane coming.”

  “I wish,” the teller said. Her long fingernails were painted a bold carnelian red, and Claire found herself staring.

  “Excuse me,” the teller said. “You want to transfer funds from an account here to an account at BCCI. Is that correct, ma’am?”

  “Yes.” She clutched her bag. “That’s right.”

  “How much are you transferring?”

  Claire pointed through the grill at the amount written on the form. “Ten million dollars.”

  The teller looked up. Claire didn’t allow herself to react to the teller’s surprise.

  “I’ll need to see identification.”

  “This is the identification.” Claire passed a note under the grill with the answer to the security question. “Mr. Withers handles the account. He can confirm this answer.”

  “And your name?”

  “It’s a code-three numbered account. You don’t need a name.”

  “I need to know who is requesting the transfer. An amount this large has special requirements.”

  Claire paused. Had she overlooked a step, or missed an instruction? Had her
husband forgotten to give her a critical piece of information? Alarms rang in her head. “You don’t need my name,” she said. “The security question”—she pointed again through the grill—“is the unique identification for a code-three account. That is all you need to initiate a transfer on this particular account. Is it clear? Account number 13-2020719-Q.”

  The teller’s smile slackened. She didn’t appreciate being corrected. “Let me ask?”

  Claire looked away from the teller, who retreated into the back, and glanced across the cathedral atrium toward the heavy bronze doors that opened onto Pennsylvania Avenue. She had left Sara outside the bank with the instruction to wait thirty minutes, and if Claire didn’t return in that time, Sara was to call her aunt, who’d come and collect her. She’d given Sara the phone number and change, pointed toward the nearby phone booth, and then she’d hugged her. “You’ll be fine,” she’d said. “I’ll be out soon.”

  But now waiting, Claire worried. How long will this take? Echoing quiet was broken by a guard’s footsteps on the marble floor and the loud whispers of a couple in the waiting area. Claire was aware of everything at once—her wait, the huge chandelier hanging on a long chain from the atrium ceiling, a balcony below a frieze of leaded windows, and the testy impatience of a customer at the adjacent teller window.

  “Ma’am?”

  Claire was being summoned by the teller, who stood at the end of the bank of windows and motioned Claire to entered a locked gate.

  “Follow me, ma’am.”

  Claire hesitated. Her first thought was that thirty minutes was too little time to accomplish the transfer, and Sara would be gone. Her second thought was that she was going to be arrested.

  “I don’t have much time,” she said, passing through the gate.

  “Mr. Withers needs to speak with you.”

  Claire was shown into a glass-walled office with a view of the working tellers, but the enclosure, even as transparent as it was, gave the confined space an intimate and confidential feeling. Assistant Vice President Withers sat behind a dark Victorian desk. He was short with a pale face creased by wire-rim glasses and a fastidious smile, which invited Claire to sit in a chair opposite the desk.