Liberty

CHAPTER TWO

When Jake returned to Washington that afternoon, he went straight to CIA headquarters at Langley. His boss was a man named Coke Twilley. He was heavyset, balding, and, Jake gathered, had joined the CIA when he graduated from college. He had once mentioned that he was a Yale graduate, which was no surprise; in the 1950s and 60’s, the CIA had recruited heavily from the Ivy League. He wore what appeared to be his college class ring on his right hand. Twilley had the look and mannerisms of a college professor. On rare occasions his fleshy features registered faint amusement, but usually his features betrayed no emotion except boredom. One was left with the impression that the only part of his professional life he enjoyed was intellectual give-and-take with his social peers, who were few and far between in the down-and-dirty trenches of espionage and office politics. His one human quality was an addiction to Coca-Cola, the sugared variety, which he sipped more or less all day, hence his nickname. What his beverage of choice did to his blood sugar level only his doctor knew.

His assistant department head was a man named Khanh Tran, though everyone called him Sonny. He was a whippet-lean Vietnamese who had come to the States when he was seven years old. He didn’t speak a word of English then, and today still had a trace of an accent. A graduate of Cal Poly, he had spent his adult life in the CIA.

This afternoon in Twilley’s office, Twilley and Sonny Tran listened to Jake’s report without interruption. He carefully covered every point. When Jake finished, Twilley asked, “Do you have any suggestions for verifying this tale?”

“Get it from another source,” Jake replied dryly.

“So where do you think the weapons are now?” Twilley idly played with an expensive fountain pen, a Christmas or birthday gift from days gone by. As usual, today he looked mildly bored, and perhaps he was.

“I haven’t the slightest idea. Neither did Ilin.”

“Richard Doyle? I’ve known him for years. A Russian spy? Do you believe that?”

“It strikes me that allegation is certainly worth checking. If it’s not true, no harm will be done. If it is …” He left the comment hanging.

“I’ve never liked Russians,” Twilley said now, apropos of nothing. He took a sip of Coke from a coffee cup, then leaned back in his padded swivel chair and laced his fingers across his ample middle. He had a habit of staring owlishly at people, which he indulged in now with Jake, blinking so rarely that some people thought he never blinked at all.

“An intelligence gift from the SVR — that KGB crowd …” Twilley snorted derisively. “Worst collection of scum on the planet. Stalin’s thugs. Murdered thirty million of their own people! I’d bet my pension those bastards have been selling weapons to terrorists for years and pocketing the proceeds. Now they’re worried that the terrorists are going to pop a nuke somewhere and the shit is going to splatter on them, so they’re covering their ass by whispering to us, blaming it all on some weenie brigadier rotting out in the boondocks. That crowd would sell coal to the devil!”

“You’ve had past dealings with Ilin, Admiral; you probably know him better than anyone in our government,” Sonny Tran said smoothly. “Have you any other thoughts that you wish Mr. Twilley to pass along?”

“Yes, I do,” Jake Grafton said. “Ilin gave us a place to start. The Sword of Islam. Regardless of why Ilin passed this information to us, we must investigate. It would be grotesquely irresponsible not to.”

“We will investigate, Admiral,” Tran assured him.

“And it goes without saying that the allegation against Doyle must also be investigated.”

“Then why say it?” Twilley shot back.

“I want to be on record as strenuously recommending an investigation. Just in case Ilin’s allegations fall through a bureaucratic crack.”

Twilley’s face was a mask. “I find that comment offensive, Grafton. The implication is that this agency is full of criminal incompetents.”

“No one can win every battle,” Jake replied, “but we’d damn well better win the war. You can take that remark any way you please.”

It had been that kind of day. He was in a foul mood, and this little session with Coke Twilley hadn’t improved it. He got up and left Twilley’s office, closing the door behind him.

When he got home that evening to the apartment in Roslyn, Jake Grafton found that his wife, Callie, and daughter, Amy, were serving dinner to guests. Toad Tarkington’s wife, Rita Moravia, was seated with her three-year-old son on her lap beside Jack Yocke, a reporter and columnist for the Washington Post that the Graftons had known for years. Yocke had brought a date, a tall woman in a business suit who appeared to be about thirty years of age. Her name was Greta Fairchild. After the introductions, Jake followed Callie into the kitchen and kissed her.

“How’d it go in New York?” she asked in a voice barely above a whisper.

“So, so.”

“How is he?”

“About the same, near as I could tell. Still smokes incessantly.”

“Hope you don’t mind the crowd. I didn’t know when you were coming home, and we invited Yocke and the Tarkingtons weeks ago. Rita says Toad will be along in a few minutes.”

“Don’t mind at all.” He kissed her again. “I missed you, lady.”

“Be careful,” she cautioned as he pulled off his sweater and tossed it on a chair. “Fairchild is a lawyer, sharp and, I suspect, a wee bit argumentative.”

“Afraid I’ll get sued?”

“Afraid you’ll get in an argument. You look like you could chew nails and spit tacks.”

Jake took a deep breath, exhaled, then smiled broadly. Holding the grin, he asked, “How’s this?”

“Fine. Go sit down and I’ll bring you a glass of wine.”

The Tarkington toadlet squirmed off his mother’s lap and ran to Jake as he pecked Amy’s cheek. “Uncle Hake, Uncle Hake, I pooped today.”

“Made his mama proud,” Rita proclaimed as the adults laughed. “Keep that up, son, and you’ll make your mark in the world.”

“You’re getting to be a real big boy,” Jake said as he lifted the youngster and gave him a smooch on his cheek. He took his usual seat at the head of the table and kept the boy on his lap.

Yocke was tall and lanky. He grinned as Jake listened solemnly to the three-year-old tell of the day’s toilet adventures. When that topic had been exhausted, he said to the admiral, “I didn’t realize the navy had gotten so casual. Jeans, no less.”

“We try to keep up with the times.” Away they went, chattering lightly. Greta Fairchild specialized in administrative law, had been with a Washington firm for five years. She was from California and, Jake gathered, had been dating Yocke occasionally for a year or so.

“Do you have any spare time now that you’re stationed in Washington?” Callie asked Rita.

“Only on weekends. I’ve gotten my civilian flight instructor rating. Tommy Carmellini is my first student. Getting time to fly is difficult, but I’ve given him four lessons.”

“Is he still scaring you?”

“Not so badly now. He’s learning. I think he likes it. Afterward he drinks beer with Toad and tells him all about it.”

Toad arrived fifteen minutes after Jake, carrying a high chair. He shook hands all around, pulled Amy upright from her chair and bent her over in a passionate matinee kiss, then dropped into the empty chair beside his wife. Amy seized the back of her chair to steady herself and gasped, “I love it when the Tarkingtons come to dinner.”

“Two days you’ve been gone,” Rita said icily to Toad, “and I don’t get the romantic treatment. Is this a hint?”

“Stand up, babe.”

As everyone cheered, Toad gave Rita a movie kiss like the one he had bestowed on Amy. When they broke, Rita’s cheeks were flushed.

“Well,” Toad demanded, “are we still a number?”

“You’ve sold me, Toad-man. Sit down and behave yourself.”

Trust the ol’ Horny Toad to lighten the mood, Jake thought. He winked at Callie and had a sip of wine.

“Is this what we have to look forward to?” Fairchild asked Jack Yocke, who put his hand on hers.

“Toad may have one more good smooch in him, if you ask him nice,” Yocke replied. Fairchild joined in the laughter. Tarkington rescued his son from his boss’s lap and installed him in the high chair.

After dinner Rita insisted on helping Callie with the dishes. Toad got into a conversation with Amy about college — she was a student at Georgetown — so Jake led Yocke into the living room. Greta Fairchild stayed with the men.

“How goes the war against terror these days?” Yocke asked. The fact that Jake was currently assigned to the antiterrorism task force was public information, but his duties were not. After knowing Grafton for years, Yocke well knew that he would not get anything classified from him. Nor could he use Jake as a source, even an anonymous one. Grafton was, in the lingo of journalists, deep background.

Grafton’s answer to the reporter’s question was a shrug. Yocke glanced at Greta, who blandly met his eyes. She had no intention of being shuffled off to the kitchen. Yocke gave up. He leaned back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other.

They talked politics for a while. Greta was not shy about voicing her opinion, which the admiral listened to with interest. Finally he said to Yocke, “So what’s wrong with the CIA?”

Yocke snorted. “The organization was put together after World War Two to keep an eye on the Russians. The mission was to prevent World War Three, and everything else was secondary to that.”

“Yet they missed the collapse of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union,” Grafton mused, “the most significant political event in Russia since the 1917 Revolution. Not a soul at the CIA even suggested that the collapse of communism was a possibility. Then, bang, it happened, leaving every policy maker in Washington stupefied with surprise. Why was that?”

“All I can tell you is what my sources say—”

“Larded with your own opinions,” Greta Fairchild interjected.

“Naturally,” Yocke said, not missing a beat. “The KGB was very good at rooting out Soviets who were spying for the U.S. And various American traitors were busy betraying these people to the KGB for money. Add in the natural aversion of liberals for intelligence bureaucracies — gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail, and after all, it is cultural imperialism — and you have an outfit that decided it could find out what it needed to know by signal intelligence and imagery, which is satellite and aircraft reconnaissance. The agency never had enough good sources in high places in Moscow to let them see the big picture of what was really going on.”

“They missed nine-eleven, too,” Jake murmured.

“From what I hear, analysts at the agency were saying that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was not an isolated threat. The Clinton administration didn’t want to hear it. Then came the USS Cole. But still, the agency is structured to warn us if the Russians are preparing for World War Three, not tell us who in the mosques and bazaars of the Islamic world is plotting atrocities and making them happen.”

“Can the agency be reformed?” Greta asked.

“Certainly. Reorganized and refocused. Yet I don’t think it will ever be as good as the KGB was. I think the American people and the politicians will lose interest in the war on terrorism — hell, you read the newspapers — and those are the consumers the agency serves. Frankly, the politicians don’t want to pay people to hunt for bad news and they don’t want to hear it when it’s found.”

“Jack, you’re a terrible cynic,” Greta remarked, and winked at her host. “But what about the FBI? Nineteen suicidal saboteurs running around the country with no one the wiser — J. Edgar Hoover must be pounding the lid of his coffin.”

“I’ll bet he is,” Jake muttered.

The conversation had moved on to other subjects when Amy came to the door and announced, “Pie and ice cream.”

Richard Doyle lived in a middle-sized, middle-class, three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house with a two-car garage in the endless suburbs of Virginia. His house sat tucked between two very similar houses on a quiet, tree-lined curvy street in a subdivision full of curvy streets and speed bumps, a subdivision indistinguishable from a hundred others sprawled across the landscape west of the Potomac.

The Doyles had an above-ground pool in their backyard. They purchased it years ago for the kids when they were small, but now that they were in high school the kids wanted to go to the community pool in the summer to hang with friends, so the Doyles’ pool was empty. Indeed, it had not contained water for several years.

Martha Doyle sold real estate from a nearby mall office of a national chain. She drove a late-model white Lexus, which she used to haul clients around to look at houses. The expenses on the car were a nice tax write-off. Many of the people looking for houses were government employees, like her husband, or worked for civil or defense contractors or consulting firms that did business with the government. Some worked in the high-tech industries west of the Beltway.

All in all, Martha Doyle was in a great place to sell real estate. Few people in the area owned a house more than three or four years; the constant turnover kept the market hot, hot, hot. She worked out at a racquet club and belonged to a variety of civic groups, which she had joined when she realized that the contacts she made there would bring her listings.

The Doyles also belonged to a church. They attended services several times a month and participated in church events. Whether the motive was listings for Mrs. Doyle or because the Doyles enjoyed belonging to a religious community, no one could say.

Richard Doyle worked for the CIA, although none of his neighbors knew it, not even his pastor. His wife knew, of course, yet never mentioned it. Both the Doyles told anyone who asked that he worked for “the government” and let it go at that. Anyone who pressed the issue was told he worked for the General Services Administration, a vast, unglamorous bureaucracy that maintained federal office buildings.

There was little to distinguish the Doyles from the tens of thousands of people who lived in similar houses and similar subdivisions in every direction, except for one astounding fact: Richard Doyle was a spy.

None of his friends or neighbors knew his fantastic secret, not even his wife. He had been passing CIA secrets to the KGB, now the SVR, for fifteen years. He was paid for his treason, yet he didn’t do it for money — indeed, he had never spent a dollar that the Russians had paid him. He had it hidden away in safety-deposit boxes scattered through the Washington metropolitan area.

Richard Doyle committed treason because it made him different from all these other middle-class schmucks slogging it eight-to-five, five days a week, forty-eight weeks a year, waiting for that magic day when they turned fifty-five years of age and could retire. He was special. He had almost two million dollars in cash stuffed in a half-dozen safety-deposit boxes and when he reached fifty-five, he wasn’t going to Florida. Oh no! He was going to live.

He had seven years to go before that happy birthday, so he didn’t really dwell on how it would be. The truth was he hadn’t really decided how he was going to spend the rest of his life. There was plenty of time.

This evening Doyle was home alone — his wife was showing a house and the kids were at a high school football game. He was thirty minutes into a Dirty Harry movie on television when the telephone rang.

“Hello.”

Richard Doyle listened for a moment, glanced at his watch, then said, “Okay,” and hung up the receiver.

He used the remote to kill the television, put on his shoes, then stood and stretched.

His wife wouldn’t be home for at least an hour and the kids were planning on catching a ride home with the neighbor down the street. He had plenty of time. He went to the kitchen and helped himself to a soft drink from the fridge. He took the can with him. Martha was driving her Lexus, so he took the vehicle he usually drove, a three-year-old maroon Dodge Caravan.

He made sure he closed the garage door, then headed for the subdivision exit. In minutes he joined the traffic on the highway.

Ten minutes later he rolled into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant in Tyson’s Corner. He knew from past visits that the restaurant’s security cameras did not tape activities in the parking lot, yet he remained in his car.

Two minutes later another vehicle, a sedan, drove into the restaurant’s lot and stopped with the engine running. Doyle glanced around, then got out of his car and walked over to the sedan. He opened the passenger door and seated himself.

“Good evening.”

“Hi.” The other man put his car in gear and drove out of the parking lot.

“I’ve got a document I want you to see, but I didn’t want to copy it. Too many pages.”

“Hot, huh?”

“Too risky to use the copiers at the office. The ones we have now have a computer memory. I’ve got to get this thing back into the file tomorrow. You can read the summary and key passages, get the gist of it.”

“Okay.”

“Once I have it back in the file, we’re safe and we’ve left no tracks.”

“You’re really worried about giving me a copy, aren’t you?”

“Hey, I haven’t gotten caught yet. If they bust you, they still got nothing on me.”

“They’re not going to bust me,” Richard Doyle said dismissively. “Shit, I’ve been doing this forever. Fucking FBI couldn’t catch a cold.”

The driver pulled into the parking lot of a fast-food joint that had gone out of business. “Did you ever eat here?” Doyle asked, gesturing at the sign. “Terrible food.”

The driver stopped the car behind the building, put the transmission in park, and turned off the ignition. He jabbed a button under the dash to release the trunk lid. Then he got out of the car and walked back to the trunk. He took out a folder, then slammed it shut. He came up to the passenger side of the car and opened Doyle’s door.

He handed Doyle the folder. “Here it is. Turn on the light over the mirror. It’s that button up there.”

As Doyle was looking up, trying to find the light switch, the driver used a silenced pistol to shoot him once just behind the right ear. Richard Doyle slumped in his seat.

The driver closed the passenger door, walked around the vehicle, got in, started the engine, and drove away.

An hour later the sedan pulled up to a gate in a chain-link fence at an airport near Leesburg. The killer flashed his lights. Another car drove up and the driver used a pass card to open the gate. The two vehicles drove between rows of sheet-metal hangars until the first car stopped. Two men got out. The killer helped them carry Richard Doyle’s body into the hangar. Only when the hangar door was closed did they turn on the light.

“Who is it?” one of the men asked the killer.

“If you really want to know, look in his wallet before you put it in the acid.”

“Don’t guess it matters.”

“You know the drill. Clothes, wallet, everything, in the acid. Concrete shoes for our friend, then put him in the water at least fifty miles off the coast.”

“We’ll get the concrete on him tonight,” one of the men replied, nudging Doyle with his foot, “let it set up, then give him his last flight tomorrow night before he starts getting too ripe.”

“Fine,” the killer said, and snapped off the hangar light. He opened the door and went out without another glance at Richard Doyle’s corpse.

The limo with dark windows cruised slowly through downtown Washington. Traffic that Saturday night was heavy, as usual, even though the hour was near 11 P.M. In Dupont Circle the chess games had their usual players and onlookers. Skateboarders zoomed on the sidewalks and a few hookers strutted hopefully, their pimps watching from a distance.

The driver of the limo looked at his watch from time to time. He was a block from Dupont Circle at two minutes before the hour, waiting for the light. He didn’t fidget, didn’t drum his fingers — he sat with both hands on the wheel watching traffic and pedestrians. When the light turned green he looked both ways to ensure no one intended to run the light, released the brake and fed gas.

He caught the light at the circle and stayed right. He glanced at the chess game nearest the streetlight — and saw a man rise from the board and shake his opponent’s hand. He was late. He should have already been on the corner.

The driver moved left and drove completely around the circle, then pulled to a stop at the light by the drugstore. The man from the chess game was wearing jeans, a pullover shirt, and tennis shoes. He stepped off the curb, grasped the rear door of the limo, and seated himself.

The chauffeur rolled immediately.

In the back the chess player nodded at the passenger on the left side of the car, a tall man with thinning blond hair, wearing a blue suit and dark red tie. “Sorry I’m late,” the chess player said. “My opponent used a gambit I haven’t seen in years.”

“Meeting like this is dangerous,” responded the suit.

“The agency and the FBI have learned about the warheads.”

“We knew they would.”

“A lieutenant general from the SVR told them. He also told them about Richard Doyle. We couldn’t wait, so I removed Mr. Doyle from the board.”

Mr. Suit sat silently. The news about Doyle was unexpected and created problems, but complaining to the man who had found the problem and solved it was not productive.

“The warheads are at the airport in Karachi,” the chess player continued. “They’ll leave Friday on a Greek ship, the Olympic Voyager.”

“Why Friday?”

“We couldn’t do it sooner.”

“So what is the government’s response to the news?”

“It’s on the president’s desk.”

The suit chuckled dryly. “So far so good. This is going to be a very profitable operation. My office got a call just two hours ago. The national security adviser has asked me to have breakfast with him tomorrow.”

“As you know, I have never sugarcoated my advice,” the chess player said, watching Mr. Suit. “The world is changing very quickly. I argued against Pakistan. I don’t think you appreciate the dangers. The militants are playing their own game.”

“We have good people there. And we’ve paid them well.”

“Let’s hope it all goes swimmingly. Whatever happens, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Dutch is a good man. He’ll get those warheads delivered.”

The chess player said nothing.

“Doyle? Will we hear anything from that?”

“I don’t think so. He has completely disappeared. I used reliable men. The FBI are already mounting a major manhunt. They will conclude that he defected or was assassinated. Regardless, there are no loose ends.”

The limo had been rolling through the downtown and was now approaching Union Station. “You may let me out anywhere along here,” the chess player said. The suit used the intercom to speak to the chauffeur, who acknowledged the order by clicking the mike.

“So what drives you?” the suit asked as the limo came to a halt near the curb. “The money or the game?”

“The game, of course,” the chess player said with a smile. He opened the door and stepped out.

The chess player stood for a moment watching the limo merge with traffic, then shrugged and walked toward the station. Once inside he took the escalator to the Metro stop, used a token to pass through the gates, and went down onto the platform.

Standing there waiting for the train, he permitted himself a grin. The game at Dupont Circle this evening had been excellent, but this one was going to be sublime. The man in the limo thought that money was the way we keep score in life. People with money always thought that.

The chess player laughed aloud.