“I am rambling and writing more than I intended. I too am troubled by the Wilson incident, but I have to keep personal feelings away from the job of running the Agency. It’s a lonely office. We err on the side of secrecy—sometimes too eagerly. Wilson’s murder is one of those bad secrets that should be declassified, but it’s wrapped inside a good secret, and therefore, regrettably, it must remain secret. I feel for Antony, but I can’t run this Agency on feelings.
“I went from Wilson’s interment to Treacher’s funeral in the National Cathedral. I should have skipped it, but I wanted to see how much fuss was made. A big, solemn, standing-room-only event. Not a dry eye, but, I suspect, not much grief. He got what he wanted—a big send-off. The president delivered a kind eulogy.
“No one mentioned how he died. Forensics confirmed both men were shot with Treacher’s pistol, and there aren’t many incontrovertible conclusions you can reach. Coffin was found drowned in Rock Creek a mile from Dupont Circle. We had to announce his death, but we’ve kept the circumstances quiet. The unnatural death of the CIA’s head of Counterintelligence would excite the fevered imaginations of the press. We’ll make a further statement when we have more to say, but now there is nothing, except the coincidence that three senior government men died the night Hurricane Eloise hit Washington. Your note was vague on your role that night. Is there anything I should know?”
Gabriel looked at the director’s question, and he realized the letter’s candid tone was a clever seduction. How like him, Gabriel thought, pleasantly dissembling to elicit information. Gabriel continued to read.
“The FBI is investigating diligently. You have made their list of fugitives, and the allegations against you grow daily. Hard to imagine one man being able to do everything you’re now accused of. Your sudden disappearance has become the basis for implicating you in several crimes, including the fraud at Riggs Bank. Your wife’s face was matched to photos taken by the bank’s security camera. Best you stay away for now. I would help you clear your name, but my circumstances have become complicated. My testimony to the Senate committee is under investigation, and I have had to hire an attorney to defend against a charge of perjury.”
GABRIEL RETURNED THE letter to its envelope. He placed it under a weighted dive belt and turned his attention to the ketch. He was at the helm, steering the boat south under a sky singed orange by a dying sun that peaked over cumulus clouds. The sun had tanned his face, and wind lifted his hair. He watched swells grow as they entered the open water on their crossing to St. Lucia. Telltales high on the sheeted mast snapped in the breeze.
As an amateur sailor he knew that the line between a sunny day and a violent storm was a minor shift in upper atmosphere wind direction, or a small temperature difference between colliding air masses. He had seen high tufted clouds on the sail out of Fort-de-France, but he had dismissed the messengers announcing the arrival of a cold front. To the west he saw a tropical storm birthing. Broad cloud galleons clipped like anvils darkened the sky.
Gabriel’s eyes came away from the distant lightning strikes and answered Sara’s question. “We’re okay. We’ll make landfall before it hits.” They were now joined by a tabby kitten that harmlessly pawed at the gulls gliding overhead, honking like French horns. One occasionally broke off only to rejoin the rear of the formation. Father and daughter watched the new member of the family, and they smiled together, finding amusement in the kitten’s antics. Sara took a string to join the kitten in play. Gabriel looked for a sign that she was doing well, but when he saw nothing to confirm his hope, he turned back to the weather. He kissed her forehead. “Go get your mother?”
Sara stood, and the kitten hopped off her lap.
“Don’t forget these.” Gabriel tossed snorkel, face mask, and fins. “Stow everything on deck. Take your algebra book. Tell your mother we’ll eat here to keep an eye on the storm.”
Once a week they made the twenty-six-mile trip across the St. Lucia Strait to Martinique to withdraw funds from their bank account at Credit Suisse. They ate lunch on the beach, bought an American newspaper at the tourist hotel, and then returned to St. Lucia with whatever mail Claire’s sister had forwarded. Washington seemed remote now.
Claire sat beside him. She’d wrapped her hair in a scarf and wore a bikini from their morning dive. Claire looked at her husband gazing at the storm. They had entered the open channel, and both his hands held the wheel against the powerful swells. Claire placed the serving tray with its dishes on the table and sipped a glass of wine, offering him a taste. She looked toward the western sky. “Are we safe?”
“The storm won’t hit until after we reach Castries.”
“Are we safe from Washington?”
Gabriel turned away from the approaching storm. “We’re safe for now.”
She nodded at the letter under the dive belt. “What did he say?”
“He claims he used me. He fired me to get to Coffin.”
“You believe him?”
He frowned. “Self-deception is the occupational hazard of a job that rewards lies.”
Claire laughed. Her voice deepened with disdain. “Men strut their time in power and then are heard from no more. He’ll be gone.” She looked at Gabriel. “Did he tell Antony?”
Gabriel shook his head.
Claire was aghast and indignant. She glared. “It’s time. It’s over.”
Was it over? Gabriel knew what had happened, but knowing the facts didn’t settle the matter in his mind, and it wouldn’t settle the matter for Antony. Knowledge was a bitter root. Here was the question that had dogged Gabriel since he had discovered that his erstwhile friend’s doubt rang alarm bells and that he’d paid the price. Why hadn’t he quit? Spoken up? Gotten out? There were no answers. Just the man. The knowing soul. But he didn’t know enough to save himself. Just the man who enjoyed his dry martini, a poem’s hug, and a weekend with his children, who didn’t want the complications of a security clearance, who found himself in a dark labyrinth not of his making. Wilson was dead, yes, but how he died lived on, the tragedy endured, the cover-up continued. All that was over were the lives of three prominent men.
Large swells broke over the ketch’s bow, sending cooling sea spray over the deck and onto them. He tasted salt in the air and felt Claire’s eyes on him.
“If he didn’t tell Antony,” she said, “then you must.”
Acknowledgments
The Coldest Warrior is based on the case of Frank Olson, who died sometime around 2:30 a.m. on November 28, 1953, when he “fell or jumped” from his room on the thirteenth floor of the Statler Hotel in New York City. The New York Medical Examiner’s report contained that ambiguous description of how Olson came to land on the sidewalk early that morning, and it was that description that shaped how Olson’s death would be viewed over three decades. Olson, forty-three at the time of his death, was a highly skilled Army scientist who worked at Fort Detrick, Maryland, a top secret U.S. Army facility that researched and tested biological warfare agents. He had been accompanied to New York by Robert Lashbrook, a CIA employee, who worked in the Agency’s Chemical Branch. Olson’s flag-draped coffin was lowered into its vault in Linden Hills Cemetery on December 1, 1953, three days later. His body had been embalmed in New York and transported to Frederick in a sealed casket. My aunt Alice, Frank’s widow, was told that disfiguring injuries suffered in his fall made it ill advised to hold his funeral service with an open casket—the first of many, many lies that she was told over thirty years.
I am deeply indebted to Frank’s two sons, particularly Eric, his eldest, for providing a wealth of information that he collected over a lifetime in his search for the truth about his father’s death. Most importantly, I witnessed the torment of a family from whom the CIA had withheld the terrible circumstances of Olson’s death.
Several books and magazine articles were indispensable sources of information about the Frank Olson case. They are: David Kairys, Philadelphia Freedom: Memoir of a Civil Rights Lawyer (University o
f Michigan Press, 2008); James Starrs with Katherine Ramslan, A Voice from the Grave: A Forensic Investigator’s Pursuit of the Truth in the Grave (Putnam, 2005); Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare (Indiana University Press, 1998); Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen, The 80 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time (Citadel Press, 2004); William Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (Hutchinson, 1978); H. P. Albarelli Jr., A Terrible Mistake (Trine Day LLC, 2009); Michael Ignatieff, “What Did the CIA Do to His Father?,” The New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2001; and Ted Gup, “The Coldest Warrior,” The Washington Post Magazine, December 16, 2001. The Frank Olson Project website provided numerous original source materials, as did transcripts of hearings held by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1977.
Several characters in the novel quote or paraphrase other works. They are William Shakespeare: “It is a wise man who knows his own child” and “His tongue is now a stringless instrument”; Paul Celan: “Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language”; Harold Pinter: “Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.”
My agent Will Roberts’s enthusiasm for the book was critical in helping it find its place in the world, and Ion Mills, my UK editor, served as an indispensable champion and advocate. Pegasus Book’s Katie McGuire embraced the story with enthusiasm and expertly polished the text. I am grateful to the book’s early readers, who provided insights and suggestions that improved the text in large and small ways: Rae Edelson, Bruce Dow, Marc Levin, Andrew Feinstein, Emily Bestler, my brother Joe Vidich, and my fellow writers in the Neumann Leathers Writers Group: Mauro Altamura, Amy Kiger-Williams, Aimee Rinehart, Dawn Ryan, and Brett Duquette. Brendan Cahill, Elizabeth Kostova, Milena Deleva, Lauren Cerand, Joseph Kanon, Michael Harvey, Helen Phillips, Susan Isaacs, Kevin Larimer, and Elliot Figman and his colleagues at Poets & Writers have been gracious with their support and encouragement. And thanks to my sons, Arturo and Joe, who have helped me understand the few things that matter and the many things that don’t. And to my wife, Linda, partner, teacher, muse, and collaborator once again. She encouraged me to write the book and helped shape it.
ALSO BY PAUL VIDICH
An Honorable Man
The Good Assassin
The Coldest Warrior
Pegasus Crime is an imprint of
Pegasus Books, Ltd.
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Copyright © 2020 by Paul Vidich
First Pegasus Books hardcover edition February 2020
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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