The Coldest Warrior

by The Coldest Warrior (retail) (epub)

  “I thought we’d sort this out,” Treacher said.

  “Just the two of us?”

  “Him, too. Three of us. You’ve met Michael Casey, I understand. Office of Security. One of the old guard.”

  Gabriel looked past Treacher, and the apparition behind became a man. When Casey lowered his flashlight, he took on a human form and his face was grim.

  Three of us? Gabriel thought of the other man who’d come and gone. He glanced back at the far exit.

  “Go ahead,” Casey said. “You’re a confident guy. Make a run for it. You might make it.” Casey pulled back the barrel of his service pistol, recharging the chamber with a bullet.

  Gabriel smiled, declining the invitation, which he found too eagerly offered. They had the advantage, and he felt peril in the man’s ready posture.

  “It was you.”

  “Me?” Treacher said.

  “Nick Arndt. Phillip Treacher. You killed Wilson. You and him.”

  There was a long silence, and the three men were small and motionless in the grotto. Gabriel had his eyes on the other two. He moved a step closer, keeping an eye on each. “You’re hoarding your words,” Gabriel said. “Speak. Tell me why I’m wrong. Tell me the pathologist’s report is wrong.”

  Gabriel took another step forward. “Let me hear the ways you’ve justified his murder to yourself. The Soviet threat. Fear of what he knew. How those times were different. Your name sullied by scandal. Go ahead. Make your case.” Gabriel’s caustic voice rose to a mocking pitch. “I want to know.”

  “That’s close enough, Jack,” Treacher replied. “Yes, I was there. By chance. I stepped into the breach. They pulled me in at the last minute. My luck to be the low man on holiday duty that night. Missed my first Thanksgiving with Tammy. She still brings it up when she’s angry. Damned by fate, you could say, as I have heard you say many times. Like you, here in this place.” Treacher’s eyes cast about the station. “Taking on this cold case.”

  “Weisenthal?” Gabriel asked.

  “What’s to tell? Wanted to be a prophet.”

  Gabriel glanced behind Treacher to Casey. “What was his prophecy?”

  Treacher grunted his answer. “Beware Communism. But that era has passed. The Soviets are a depleted economy, a humiliated Army, a bankrupt ideology. They’ll collapse. Weisenthal needed a new conviction, which he found by rejecting everything he once believed.”

  “Jesus fuck.”

  “Me?” Treacher laughed. “Too much in your mind, Jack. It’s all in the past. Leave it there.”

  “What happened to Weisenthal?”

  “The death he got is the death he deserved. A chameleon who found a good disguise in the shadings of our times.”

  Gabriel heard in Treacher’s voice the velvet arguments of a man hoping to close a sale. Gabriel again looked at Casey, whose eyes were coals on a granite face.

  “I want what you’re giving the Times,” Treacher said. “Hand it over, then fly off. Live the rest of your life on a beach somewhere.”

  Gabriel removed the manila envelope from its plastic cover and showed that it was empty. “It’s in the mail. On its way.” His lie came out easily. His index finger slipped onto his Glock’s trigger. “I have what I came for. My death, should it happen in this place, will complete the story and seal your fate.”

  Silence lengthened among the men as the dimensions of Gabriel’s treachery sank in.

  “It’s winging its way to an eager audience,” Gabriel said. “On its way. Gone.”

  Gabriel saw Treacher glance back at Casey, who stood a dozen yards behind. Treacher was turned. It was just for a moment, but that was enough. Old anger warmed Gabriel’s heart, and contempt coursed through his blood. His reserve, which had always made him cautious and contained his desire to punish Treacher’s sense of entitlement, vanished. Gabriel hit Treacher in the jaw with his Glock’s handle, knocking him to one knee. Gabriel’s blow, coming while Treacher’s eyes were turned, caused Treacher to drop his Colt, which skidded twenty feet along the platform.

  The two old acquaintances looked at each other. Treacher rubbed his jaw. Blood flowed from his split lip, and Treacher looked up from his crimson palm. He smiled. “Well done.”

  Gabriel pointed his Glock at Treacher’s temple, inches away. His eyes flicked to Casey, who’d gone perfectly still as he calculated the changed circumstance.

  Then Gabriel looked at Treacher’s humbled face. He saw the deep exhaustion of a guilty man whose crime was catching up with him.

  Treacher raised his bloody hand, eyes wide in a vague plea. “I deserve what you want to do. Pull the trigger. Shoot me,” he said. “Spare me the suffering. Hyenas in this town will feast. We both know how it ends. Renounced. Picked over. Careers don’t recover. Fallen men never rise—jealousy, envy, retribution attack the wounded beast.”

  Gabriel’s urge to avenge weakened. He felt oddly sympathetic to this kneeling man.

  “Here we are,” Treacher said. “Victor and vanquished. The only time I’ve lost to you. Don’t pity me. Don’t hate me either. Kill me.”

  Gabriel stood above the dishonored man. His rage was calmed by the man’s plea to take his life rather than endure opprobrium. The words were swaying Gabriel little by little, and as he listened, he felt a corrupting kindness weaken his resolve to punish the man. This wasn’t about Good and Evil. Those Romantic abstractions didn’t apply to Washington’s civilized corruption, which rewarded selfish and convenient choices, however base and disreputable.

  “Who was responsible in the Agency?” Gabriel asked. “You authorized it?”

  “Not me.”

  “Somebody else higher up? You have no idea who, I suppose. Or do you?”

  Treacher’s bleeding mouth opened to speak. His eyes widened, but his voice was silenced by something that caught his attention.

  “Who ran the operation inside the Agency?” Gabriel demanded.

  Treacher pointed past Gabriel. Gabriel pivoted and saw James Coffin standing twenty feet away in dim light, having stepped away from the kiosk. He had recovered Treacher’s Colt and now held it in two hands, arms extended, feet spread.

  “Drop the weapon.”

  Gabriel placed his gun on the platform and watched Coffin, whose marksman’s eye sighted along the barrel. Gabriel saw the muzzle flash, and the gun’s blast reverberated inside the vaulted space, a deafening explosion of sound. Gabriel had blinked, and the explosion erased a moment of time. He touched his chest, certain he would find blood and a mortal wound, but there was no blood and no pain, nor did he see a wound on Treacher. He looked back and saw Casey was on his back on the platform, motionless. His gun had fallen from his hand and lay useless at his side.

  “He was going to shoot you,” Coffin said to Gabriel.

  Gabriel stared at the fallen man lit by his dropped flashlight. Crimson leaked from a small round entry wound on Casey’s forehead, and a slowly enlarging pool of blood came from the exit wound on the back of his head. Casey’s eyes were open and unfocused in the chill of death.

  And then a second gunshot hallowed out the station’s ringing quiet.

  Gabriel looked down at Treacher. He’d been shot in the ear at close range, execution style. Coffin was at Gabriel’s side, wiping his finger prints from the Colt, which he placed on the platform beside Treacher.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Jack. Don’t forget to breathe. This is what you wanted.”

  Gabriel stared at Coffin and took a moment to comprehend the incomprehensible. His mind tried to pattern an answer from the unexpected shock, feeling disoriented and suddenly struck by the suddenness of his circumstance. He looked down at Treacher, his old adversary but also a sort of friend. He didn’t feel anger or outrage, only pity and kindness evoked by the harmless dead.

  “It’s a simple story,” Coffin said, pointing at the two bodies. “Murder and suicide. Old demons rose up between two conspirators who no longer trusted each other. Something from deep in their past that isn�
��t known and is now unknowable. The story is unbelievable given who they are, but it will convince everyone because in substance it is true.”

  Coffin was matter-of-fact, but his conviction was real, his reasoning was real, and the two dead men on the platform were real. All that was false was his smile.

  COFFIN AND GABRIEL stood silently over the two corpses. The entombing silence of the space was broken by gurgling floodwaters. It was only Coffin’s echoing footsteps that got Gabriel to shift his eyes from Treacher and take his mind off their sorry history.

  Coffin was seated on a bench in the center of the platform, and he patted the seat, inviting Gabriel to join him. Coffin drew on his filtered cigarette and released a lungful of smoke in a steady stream. He raised the cigarette, observing the glowing tip in his long fingers.

  “I followed you here,” he said.

  Gabriel turned to Coffin.

  “I expected something like this from you,” Coffin added. “I didn’t know what you had on your mind when I left you at the Botanical Gardens, but I knew you were on to something. You’ve been a dog with a bone about this Wilson thing. You have your answer now.”

  “An answer, yes. The answer?”

  Coffin laughed.

  “Tell me that what lays here on the concrete is the truth,” Gabriel pressed.

  Coffin drew again on his cigarette and patiently released smoke from his mouth, forming rings in the air. He considered his answer. “We had no gulag to send Wilson to. What were we to do with him? He was unstable and in possession of a terrible state secret. We treasure our civil liberties, but in Wilson’s case the Soviet gulag system would have given us a better choice. But we didn’t have that choice.”

  Again Coffin studied the lengthening ash of the tip. He looked at Gabriel. “Speak up, Jack. Your tongue is a stringless instrument.”

  “Weisenthal?”

  “Conscience makes wise men mad.”

  “Casey?”

  “His wickedness contaminated his office.”

  “Treacher?”

  “Bad luck to pull holiday duty.”

  “Me?”

  “You?” Coffin paused a moment before offering his judgment. “Good heart. Great talent. Self-righteous prick.” He looked off. “Our Agency is an unweeded garden that needs tending. Care must be taken. We can’t raise the Agency against itself. The whole enterprise would fall. We need to take care of our own, quietly.”

  “Weisenthal and now them,” Gabriel said. “You’ve purchased time, that’s all.”

  Gabriel was aware that his Glock was on the concrete a few yards away. He didn’t know if Coffin had brought his own pistol. “You think all this will go unknown,” Gabriel said. “I know it. Or maybe I’ll be the means for you to tie up loose ends. Is there a window nearby?”

  Coffin looked at Gabriel. “You are sawing the air, Jack. Nothing has to happen. We can know the truth and not share it. Wilson was a security risk, and we couldn’t be undone by one unstable man full of scruples.”

  Gabriel contemplated Coffin’s remark. When Gabriel spoke, his voice was thick with sarcasm. “You are a noble man, James. You acted improperly, but for a proper reason. Yes, that is the sign of a noble man. You saw danger in Wilson’s confused mind. You feared he’d blow the whistle on our use of terrible weapons, so you sacrificed your scruples to defend freedom, incriminated yourself for a good cause, gave up peace of mind so that we might keep ours. You are a selfless patriot, James. A noble man.”

  Coffin had thrown his cigarette to the platform and ground it with his heel. “Too much in your head, Jack.” He pulled a pistol from his raincoat and put the steel muzzle hard against Gabriel’s chest. His eyes were dull and weary.

  “Stand up. Move to the edge of the platform.”

  Gabriel was on his feet. He coveted the Glock that was far out of reach. “You killed Weisenthal, too,” he said. “And Kelly.” He had suspected that in the Botanical Gardens. Only the murderer would confidently place Kelly among those implicated in Wilson’s death. Coffin’s silence was Gabriel’s answer, just as it had been an answer to Gabriel’s claim that it had all begun in Berlin. He saw in Coffin the executioner’s stamina for killing.

  Gabriel was at the platform’s edge, and he looked down into the swirling water. He was conscious of powerful currents bearing him ceaselessly into the past. This was his time to die. He felt the noose on his neck, and he stared down from the hangman’s platform into the void below the water’s surface.

  Gabriel’s eyes caught the motion. Coffin had lifted his pistol, and in so doing his sleeve pulled back. Gabriel saw the pistol’s blue-black barrel, but his eyes settled on the man’s bespoke wristwatch in the traditional English style, graced with a tonneau crystal. Gabriel raised his wrist to reveal his own watch’s graceful bezel with tonneau shape and dual time-zone face. “I gave a similar watch to Wilson. He saved my life, and then you took his.”

  Gabriel’s savage vengeance flared in a fury. Grief and anger burned hot in his chest. The sight of the elegant timepiece swept away all reserve that was confederate to his surrender. Memory stung. His fist erupted from his side, knocking Coffin’s arm away so the bullet, when it came, harmlessly ricocheted from the platform. Gabriel’s left fist followed with indignant force that caught the unbalanced Coffin, and the startled man tipped into the sucking current.

  Coffin gave a cry but said nothing, pulled by the rushing water. His arms thrashed wildly, but the weight of his wet clothes dragged him under and, still thrashing, he disappeared into the dark tunnel.

  27

  St. Lucia Straits

  We are well,” Gabriel had written the director, without disclosing their whereabouts. He saved the director from choosing duty over friendship, knowing how that choice would come out. He’d given a redacted account of what happened in the Metro station to prepare the director for the heightened scrutiny the Agency would receive after the violent deaths of three men linked to the CIA. Gabriel had also written that he wouldn’t add to the widening scandal by making public the circumstances of Wilson’s death. As far as Gabriel was concerned, his work was finished. He needed to put the past to bed. The killing was over, and his spirit was stilled by the sweeping skies and tranquil horizons aboard their sixty-three-foot ketch.

  GABRIEL HAD THE director’s response in his hands. It was a personal letter that had found its way to Gabriel via the reverse of the circuitous route Gabriel’s note had taken—Claire’s sister to a post office box in Miami where a retired Cuban who owed Gabriel a favor reposted the letter to a second post office box in Martinique.

  “Thank you for returning the carbons of your report,” the director’s letter began. “You didn’t explain how they got out of Headquarters, but I’ll assume it was an oversight. I am glad to have them. I was hasty when I shredded the original, and I’m glad to get the carbons so we can re-create your memo and make it a part of our history. One day the story will be told. Let the next director make that choice.

  “You might hold me responsible for what happened, and I am partly to blame, but not in the way you imagine. I forced you out not because I’d lost confidence in you. I had complete confidence in you. I suspected Coffin, but he was untouchable—a fox in his hole who had to be flushed. You were the best man for this, and you wanted to leave anyway. I counted on your pique to keep you on the case from the outside, and I was right about that. We got to know each other in the Central Highlands, and I used that knowledge against you. This note is an apology of sorts. I was glad to get your letter because it gave me an opportunity to reflect.

  “I suspected Coffin, but I had nothing to go on except that he was among a handful of senior men in the Agency in ’53. The only way forward was to have him think you would expose him. Mueller was uncomfortable being the stocking-masked snitch pointing you in directions that vexed Coffin, but in the end he agreed to go along. Pushing you out the door made it look like I’d lost interest. I wanted Coffin to play his hand, and he did. What a piece of work: nob
le in reason, honorable in intent, infinite in cruelty. The best of us are rich in contradictions, and that makes us interesting, but James was at the extreme of contradictions and that made him deeply, mysteriously fascinating. He was a staunch Cold Warrior—the coldest warrior.

  “Knowing the truth is a very lonely thing, and I appreciate that you’ve chosen to stay silent. People wouldn’t understand the story. They would doubt it completely or accept it glibly, saying, “Well of course the CIA kills people.” But even they wouldn’t believe that we would kill one of our own.

  “At your urging, I attended Wilson’s interment. His remains were placed in a new casket and returned to his grave. I stood in the back, but Antony Wilson recognized me. When the brief ceremony was finished, he approached. He was bitter, and he said no one should have to dig up his father. I had him and his sister to lunch at the Agency, and I gave them the documents that you discovered in the archive. He was grateful to have evidence that confirmed some of what he already suspected. I didn’t tell him that his father was murdered. I know that’s what he believes, and I didn’t dissuade him of his belief, but I didn’t confirm it.

  “It was a great burden to stay silent and not give him the satisfaction of knowing what we know. Keeping the truth from the family is necessary even if it’s a wretched thing. Harm to us outweighs whatever closure knowledge would bring him. ‘Closure’—such a terrible word. It suggests that reconciliation accompanies knowledge when in fact, as you wrote, one answer begets another question, question following question, and in the end the things that were in men’s minds remain forever mysterious, like life itself.