The Art of War

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The next morning Jake was at work at seven thirty. As usual these days, FBI liaison Zoe Kerry was waiting in the reception area to give him his morning briefing on the investigations of the murders of Tomazic, Reinicke and Maxwell.

He waved her into the office and asked, as he took off his suit coat and put it on a hanger, “What has the FBI learned since yesterday that I don’t know about?”

“Nothing, sir.”

Grafton spun to face her. “Bullshit. Either the FBI is stonewalling you or they are incompetent. Which is it?”

“The priority is the attempted assassination of the president,” Kerry shot back. She was still standing, looking at Grafton from halfway across the room. “We have only so many agents.”

Grafton walked over to his desk and parked a cheek on the front of it. She found herself looking into those cold gray eyes as he examined her face. The scar on his temple, an old bullet wound, some said, was a reddish hue as he spoke. “The director of the FBI was murdered, gunned down on a street in the nation’s capital, and the FBI isn’t moving heaven and earth to find out who did it? I may be an old country boy, but I am not naïve enough to buy that crock of Pelosi. I want you to go to the Hoover Building this morning and tell your boss to tell Harry Estep that I want to be kept briefed on progress. You know as well as I do that the same people were probably also behind Tomazic’s and Reinicke’s deaths. Crack one and you’ve cracked all three. Tell Harry that I don’t give a shit what he tells the press or the White House, but he’d better keep me informed. Got it?”

“Yessir.” Her face was frozen.

“I hope so. I’m sure you’ll have a complete brief for me tomorrow morning. If you don’t, you and I will go to the Hoover Building and we’ll see Harry Estep together.”

“I understand.”

“Get going.”

She wheeled and left.

I read the latest from across the Atlantic in the International New York Times, which was thrown in front of my door at my hotel, as I ate breakfast in the hotel dining room. After reading the news and all the pieces of the op-ed page, pro and con, I sipped my coffee and gave silent thanks that I was here and not there.

Anna Modin was here, and that gave the day a glow I hadn’t seen in a long time. Not since I first met her a few years ago. I sighed contentedly and poured another cup of joe from the thermos on the table. It was thick as Mississippi bottomland dirt and just as wet, but I had learned years ago that there wasn’t a decent cup of coffee anywhere east of Boston. If you are going to be a traveling man, you gotta take your caffeine any way you can get it.

This contented sighing was largely due to the fact that I didn’t expect Anna to hear from Janos Ilin for a while. I was taking Anna to a white-tablecloth, expense-account dinner every evening and staying late at her place. I refused to spend the night and be seen departing in the cold light of morning. As it was, I was disobeying Grafton and putting her at risk: No sense being a fool about it.

Underneath my bonhomie was the cold hard fact that this romantic interlude would come to an abrupt end in the near future. I had to go back to Washington. I wondered if I could talk Anna into quitting her job and coming along. Wondered if she loved me enough. Wondered if I was important enough to her. Wondered the same things lovers have been wondering since Adam and Eve were evicted from the garden.

Maybe this evening I would pop the question. Or tomorrow evening. Or the evening after that. I had asked her to marry me before, way back when, and been refused. Could I induce her to change her mind? Or had she already done so and was waiting for me to bring it up?

Maybe it was just a fantasy. Living together in the good ol’ U.S. of A., home of baseball and the NFL. A little place in the suburbs with a flat-screen TV and cable and a barbecue out back. Because I was a tightwad, spent a lot of time overseas riding the expense account and drove a paid-for, worn-out old car stateside, I had some money saved up, enough for a decent down payment on a house. Plus a job, with a steady income. Private enterprises and corporations come and go, but nothing is steadier than working for Uncle Sugar.

So I was indulging in what-if reverie when I realized the man helping himself to the muesli on the breakfast bar was as tall and lean as Abe Lincoln. When he turned to pour a little milk into his bowl, I got his profile. Yep. It was Janos Ilin.

Damn! The bastard must have jumped the first jet from Moscow as soon as someone called him about the message from Anna.

I sipped on my java and glanced around the room to see who was with him. No one, apparently. He and I were the only guests in the dining room. Probably because it was a few minutes after ten and the honest guests of this fine establishment had gone off to tend to their business appointments or call on their Swiss bankers.

He sat down at a table against the wall, facing the dining room door, and went to work on his cereal. One of the waiters came from the kitchen with a pot of something hot. Water. Ilin looked through the tea bag selection and chose one. He had a copy of a paper, a local one to judge from the German-language headlines, and he got absorbed in that as the minutes ticked by. He never once looked my way, and I tried to ignore him. He talked to the waiter in German.

When he finished the tea and I had folded my Times and put it aside, Ilin rose and made his way down the corridor that led to the men’s room. I waited three minutes, then followed him.

He was standing in the men’s room facing the door. “Mr. Carmellini,” he said when the door closed behind me.

“Mr. Ilin.” He didn’t offer to shake hands, so I didn’t.

“We met once before, a few years ago. You were with Jake Grafton.”

“I remember.”

“How is he?”

“Acting director of the firm. Mean as ever.”

Something like a trace of a smile crossed his face. “I have something for him. A map.” He produced an envelope from a coat pocket and passed it to me.

I put it into the breast pocket of my sport coat. “Anything you want me to tell him about this?”

“It came from one of my agents in China. Waving it around in the wrong quarters could endanger his usefulness, not to mention his life.”

“I’ll mention his life anyway.”

I removed the small brown envelopes that contained the dental X-rays from my pocket and handed them over. I explained what they were. “My boss would like to know who these men were and whom they worked for. The attempted assassination of the president has got the Americans hopping mad. Any help you can give will win you a lot of gratitude. My boss said he would take any help or information offered as a personal favor.”

Ilin put the envelope in his jacket pocket. “I will give all the help I can,” he said. “You will meet a certain man at the corner bar at the Willard Hotel in Washington at noon two weeks from today. You or Jake Grafton. No one else. He will join you and say, ‘A mutual friend was talking about you the other day.’ You will reply, ‘Which friend? I have several.’ If you cannot make the meet, or are followed, keep going back at noon on successive days.”

“Okay.”

He turned to the sink and began washing his hands.

I squared my shoulders and said, “I’m taking Anna back to the States with me.”

“Oh!” He glanced at me. “Does she want to go?”

“If she wants to go.”

He glanced at me with a look of amusement. “Are you asking permission?”

“No. I’m telling you.” I turned and walked out.

Zoe Kerry had a report for Jake Grafton when he came to work the day after their confrontation. The three pages took twenty minutes for her to brief. Lots of minutia about all three murders, Maxwell’s, Reinicke’s, and Mario Tomazic’s, and two pages of trivia about the shootdown of the presidential airplane.

Jake scanned the pages, asked a few questions and said, “There isn’t one significant fact in this puree of trivia.”

“We’re working on it, sir. Early in an investigation, progress is often a matter of establishing negatives.”

“You think?”

“Everyone in the agency wants these killers caught, and we’re moving heaven and earth to make it happen.”

Grafton sighed. “Every morning I want to see you in here with a report. Tell Harry Estep that I want to see evidence of a conspiracy. Any conspiracy. To commit any crime. From jaywalking to murder to stealing books from the Library of Congress. Anything. And I want any evidence any of your agents can find pointing to the identity of the killer of Mario Tomazic, the director of this agency.”

“I don’t think you are in our chain of command, sir.”

Jake Grafton smiled. Perhaps. At least his teeth showed and his eyes turned cold. “I don’t want to get into a pissing match with the FBI, and Harry Estep doesn’t want to get in a pissing match with this agency. Discuss this conversation with him. I’m sure he will agree. I need to see evidence of a conspiracy, if there is one, so this agency can do the job for which it was created. And if the person or persons who killed Tomazic came from this agency, or from overseas, I need to know that so I can do my job. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tomorrow morning, Kerry.”

She left, and Harley Merritt came in carrying his coffee cup and a file filled with things he wanted Grafton’s opinion on. They got back to the serious business of global intelligence.

When Anna came home from work, I was sitting in the darkness waiting. “Oh, Tommy,” she said, and dropped her coat and opened her arms. She gave me a great hug. Oh, man …

I already had a bottle of her favorite wine open and a glass poured. When she finally released me, I got her seated in her little living room and handed the wine to her.

“I saw Ilin today,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, surprise in her voice. “I had no message.”

“He walked into my hotel dining room a few minutes after ten o’clock. We had a little conversation in the men’s room.”

“So you’re going back to America?” she said. I tried to wring a clue from her voice and the way she said it, but couldn’t.

“Soon,” I said with nothing behind it. “I was thinking … Well, Anna, I was hoping you would come with me.”

She stared. Completely forgot the wineglass in her hand and stared into my eyes. I stared right back.

“Will you?” I asked.

“Is this a marriage proposal?”

“I tried that once and it didn’t work. I’m lowering the barrier. If I can get you over this little fence, get you to America, get you to see how great life would be with us together, then I’ll try another proposal. See, I’ve thought this out.”

She smiled at me. “I’ve been thinking, too,” she said.

“If you have a Swiss passport you don’t need a visa to get into the States. Do you have one?”

She nodded. Yes.

“Soooo…” I tried to contain myself. I reached for her hands. We were already knee to knee.

“Oh, Tommy. I—”

“Come on, kiddo. This is the best offer you’re going to get today. Let’s get on with life. Let’s worry about Anna and Tommy. Nobody else.”

She didn’t say anything. The thought that perhaps I was pressing too hard occurred to me. “What have you been thinking?” I asked.

“That I was a fool not to say yes the first time you asked me.”

That did it. She started laughing and crying at the same time and I started laughing and crying and we went on up into the stratosphere from there.

We managed to get on a plane to Washington, via London, the following morning. I used my Harold W. Cass credit card to buy both tickets. If the Company bean counters didn’t like it, they could rat me out to Grafton and he could fire me.

Anna called her office from the airport and told them she was resigning. We checked our bags, went through security and walked the concourse holding hands. As we flew across Europe we talked about the future, not the past. I was pretty sure there wasn’t much more of the CIA in mine. I was tired of going overseas for weeks, or months, often to places no sane person would even want to visit. Tired of pretending to be something and someone I’m not.

I had a law degree. Maybe I could go back to California and take the bar exam. What I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to stay in the Washington, DC, area. I had been there for enough years to know I didn’t like it. California! Yeah.

Changing planes in London, we had an hour to kill after we got to our gate. We walked into a bookstore/newsstand and I bought some newspapers. One of the stories at the bottom of the front page of The Wall Street Journal caught my eye. Homeland Security had been ordered by the White House to step up inspections on people leaving and entering the United States. Entering? The Journal predicted long lines for travelers. No kidding!

I stood there thinking about the envelope that Ilin had given me, which was in the breast pocket of my jacket. What if they found that? Confiscated it? Wanted an explanation? I was traveling as Harold W. Cass, Hoosier extraordinaire, with a fake passport issued by the U.S. State Department and a fake driver’s license and AAA card, all issued by the documents section of the agency. What if customs got curious about the map? The computer should let my passport slide on through, but this map … I hadn’t looked at it, but obviously Ilin had gone to a great deal of trouble getting it to me and thought it would mean something to Grafton if I could deliver it.

“Wait at the gate a moment,” I told Anna, and went back along the concourse toward a Royal Mail storefront I had noticed walking up. It was about twice the size of a telephone booth. The gray-haired lady in uniform behind the counter had envelopes and stamps. I bought an envelope, stuck Ilin’s envelope inside, and addressed it to Willie Varner at the lock shop. Bought enough stamps with my CIA credit card to get it all the way across the Atlantic, affixed them and dropped the envelope in the slot.

Feeling somewhat relieved, I strolled back to Anna, who was waiting at the gate. She smiled at me as I walked up and reached for my hand. A huge grin spread across my face. Life was looking up.

It was afternoon when we landed at Dulles Airport in the western suburbs of Washington. We got through immigration easily enough after the usual wait, me through the U.S. citizens line and Anna through the foreigners section, and found our baggage at the carousel.

The line to get through customs was severely backed up. From where I stood, I could see the inspectors pawing though luggage. Beyond the inspectors, against the wall, were armed Homeland Security officers in uniform, scanning the crowd. They didn’t look bored. Which bothered me. The whole scene reminded me of my last trip through the Moscow airport. Guilty until proven innocent.

“Get in another line,” I whispered to Anna. “If we get separated, meet me at Grafton’s in Roslyn. You remember the address?”

She nodded. She was a professional. She had committed that address to memory years ago, when she was sent by Ilin to see Grafton. She glanced at me just once and went, no questions asked, pushing her cart with her suitcase and carry-on.

It took an hour for me to get to the head of the line. I surrendered my customs form, which said I had not bought anything abroad and had nothing to declare. Then I dumped my stuff on the conveyor belt and watched them x-ray both items.

The fun began when the stuff came out of the X-ray machine on the belt. An inspector there had my customs form in hand. He gestured at the bag and carry-on. “Open them up.” He pointed to a nearby table. I carried the bags over and tossed them up.

After I opened them, I stood back when he gestured. He started through the stuff as if he suspected I was smuggling in a load of heroin or Cuban cigars. He emptied the clothes, felt the lining, wadded the clothes up and put them back in, then attacked the carry-on, which had the newspapers from London, a couple of books and my cell phone, which was off, a wall charger and my key ring. Plus a toothbrush and toothpaste.

When he had given all that stuff a very careful look, he gestured to a couple of the armed goons. “You need to go with these gentlemen. They will do a body search.”

“Guess this is my lucky day,” I said. “I hope they have warm hands.”

“Don’t get cute, buddy.”

I thought that excellent advice. I was taken through a security door into a long puke-green corridor. The feds must buy puke-green paint in railroad tank cars. Lots of doors. They picked one halfway down on the left side and sent me in first. My bags were brought in, too. As two people searched the luggage again, meticulously, I was told to strip to the skin. Then I was given a body cavity search.

When the jerk finished and was taking off his rubber glove, I said, “I hope you enjoyed that.”

“Keep talking, asshole, and we’ll do it again.”

There is a time and place for everything, I reflected, and this wasn’t it. The guy tossed me a small towel to wrap around my waist; then I was led back into the corridor and into a room at the end that housed a major X-ray machine. I expected to meet Dr. Frankenstein, but I got an overweight guy wearing a white gown. He coached me through a complete body series. If I had had an implanted microchip or a diamond in my ear, they would have seen it. Ditto a condom of coke in my intestines.

“How do my lungs look?” I asked. “I had a chest X-ray scheduled. Maybe I can cancel it.”

My technician ignored me.

Afterward, a heavyset guy with lots of tattoos took me back to the original cubicle, gestured to my pile of duds and told me to get dressed. When I was reunited with my luggage, I told the inked-up dude, “I assume you’ll send the bill to Obamacare.”

“Your tax dollars hard at work, Jack. Scram.”

The whole ordeal took about an hour and a half. Anna was nowhere in sight when I emerged. I took the bus into the long-term parking lot. I sat there feeling pretty good about my decision to mail the map to Willie Varner as we rode the rows and people got on or off the bus.

My old Benz was right where I left it. The tires still had air. After I loaded my bags into the trunk, the door lock admitted me. I arranged myself behind the wheel and clicked the seat belt. Inserted the ignition key, said my usual prayer, and twisted the thing. Nothing. The engine didn’t even make a noise.

I opened the door again. The dome light didn’t come on.

Uh-oh! I got out, opened the hood and took a look. Yep. The battery was gone. Some asshole had stolen it. They hadn’t taken off the terminal wires, but had cut them.

Welcome home, Tommy!

I was cussing when the realization hit me that I could have easily been dead. Instead of some lowlife stealing the battery, what if that Dumpster diver from Grafton’s had put some dynamite under the hood? Was this a warning from the bomber?

I felt the icy fingers of the devil run up and down my back. And now I had Anna to worry about.

I took a taxi to Grafton’s. On the way I played with my phone, got the video from the security cameras and saw Anna in the kitchen talking to Callie.

When the admiral got home at six o’clock, Anna, Callie and I were finishing off our second bottle of wine. He looked a little stunned when he saw Anna. Callie jumped right in. “Jake, Tommy and Anna are engaged.”

She and Anna looked at each other and smiled, as if they knew something we males didn’t.

Jake Grafton looked surprised. He gave me the once-over to see if I had lost it or suffered a severe head injury. After he decided I looked more or less normal, he made polite noises for a minute or two, “Congrats” and all that, then motioned for me to follow him into his office.

He closed the door behind me and demanded, “What the hell has gotten into you?”

“I’m going to commit matrimony. Hormones, probably. Anna and I got the urge at roughly the same time.”

“What if she’s a spy for the SVR?”

“If the FBI catches her doing nefarious stuff in the good ol’ U.S. of A., they can prosecute her.”

“I see. You know that you’ll have to resign from the agency when the preacher signs the marriage license. Before the ink’s dry. Why don’t you two just shack up together?”

I tried to look horrified. “You mean, like, live in sin? The shock might kill dear ol’ Mom. And I’d have to lie when I do the annual lie detector thing. You know how adverse I am to falsehoods.”

Grafton threw up his hands. “Oh, hell. Okay, you win. The day before the wedding, you resign. Get married unemployed.”

“Okeydokey.”

He dropped into a chair. “Where’s Ilin’s stuff?”

“I mailed it to Willie Varner. An envelope that he said contained a map. The stuff you asked for he said would take a couple of weeks.” I told him about the meet at the corner bar at the Willard.

“A map of what?”

“He didn’t say, and I didn’t open the envelope to peek. He said he got it from a guy in China. He said the guy had risked a lot and if anyone saw it his life might be in danger — all the usual crap. All of which meant hold it close. The thought struck me as I watched him that I was hearing precisely what he would have said if he were selling a map generated in a Moscow apartment to peddle to foreign spies for a thousand bucks a copy. I don’t know what you paid for this piece of graphic art. Maybe there is a lost gold mine or buried pirate treasure under the X. I suspect there is a very slim chance you got a bargain, and a much larger chance you got screwed.”

Jake Grafton watched my face as I spoke. When I ran out of words, he said, “Tell me what happened at the airport.”

I sat down across from him and went through it as best I could.

He had questions. “Did you get the impression that they knew you weren’t the guy on your passport?”

“Well, not really. But they were looking for something that they believed I had. I didn’t think they were just randomly searching. They were hunting for something they knew was there.”

He thought about that for a moment, then said, “Why did you decide in England to mail the thing?”

I shrugged. “An article in the paper … just a feeling I had. If they’d got their hands on it, as paranoid as they are, I’d be in a cell incommunicado until the very last terrorist goes to his reward in Paradise.”

“That’s the mystery.” Jake Grafton regarded me as an unusual specimen. “Why did you decide to mail it and not carry it — carefully — upon your person?”

I shrugged as I thought about my answer. Finally I said, “Because I thought it was more likely to get here if it was delivered by the post office. Willie isn’t on anybody’s list of dangerous characters, so I sent it to him. Also, I knew his address.”

Grafton sighed. Yeah, Willie was probably below the radar. If they were working off a list of the president’s ten thousand worst enemies, Willie Varner, black ex-con, probably wasn’t on it. “Let’s talk about your car,” he said. “Instead of stealing the battery, someone could have put a bomb under the car or under your hood.”

“That thought occurred to me.” I tried to keep my voice even.

Grafton grimaced. “The FBI says they can’t find anything on that Dumpster guy you ran into at Dulles.”

“I didn’t think they would.”

“Why not?” He regarded me with knitted brows.

“Just an itch between my shoulder blades. Something isn’t right.”

“A whole lot of things aren’t right,” Grafton said with feeling. “Welcome home!”

Mrs. Grafton insisted on fixing dinner. I sat and watched Anna’s face as she chatted, ran her eyes over me, sipped a glass of chardonnay, gestured with her hands. I liked the way her eyes moved, the way she smiled, the way she tossed her head occasionally to get a stubborn strand of hair back from her eyes. I liked the sound of her voice, the accent, the way she chose words and made them sound. I wondered if I would ever get over the wonder of being with her.

Jake Grafton was apparently relaxed. He smiled and chatted and his eyes took in everything.

Of course it was Callie Grafton who got to the nub of it. She asked Anna, “You and Tommy — isn’t this sudden?”

Anna looked at me and said, “I should have married him the first time he asked, several years ago, when I was here. Life gave us a … what do you say?… a do-over again?”

“A do-over.”

“Yes. A chance to make another choice, a better choice.” Her hand grasped mine. “He asked again, and this time I knew the right thing to say. The right thing for both of us.”

Dinner was salad with chicken, with Callie’s homemade dressing.

After dinner Grafton took me back to his office and gave me a pistol for my pocket. It was loaded. He put one in his pocket, too. “We’ll talk more tomorrow. Let’s go get the car and I’ll drive you two over to your place.”

“You still have guards in a van around the corner?”

“Oh, yes. I feel like a crime boss.”

We got the car from the garage, after opening the hood and checking it out, and Grafton parked in front of his building in the loading zone. I went upstairs and hauled Anna’s bags down, then went back for mine. We said good-bye to Callie, who kissed us both.

Traffic that evening was terrible. Everyone inside the Beltway was trying to get out. As we crept along in stop-and-go traffic, a fine mist of rain smeared the windshield. Grafton played with his wipers, and we chatted.

I have relived that drive in my memory a dozen times, and I can’t recall what we talked about. Anna sat in the backseat behind Grafton, and I rode twisted around so I could see her. I remember her smile. She was so full of hope. Full of life.

Grafton dropped us under the awning of my building, so we were out of the misting drizzle as we unloaded the luggage. I got out my keys and opened the door to the building. Grafton wanted to help me carry the luggage, but I refused. Anna and I could pull it on the little wheels, and we had kept him long enough. I can’t remember what I said. Thanked him, certainly. I remember him hugging Anna and shaking my hand and smiling broadly.

Then he held the door until we were through it. The elevator came as he drove away.

I remember thinking that if I had known I was bringing Anna home, I could have really cleaned up the apartment. Oh well.

I opened the door, let her precede me, then began dragging luggage in. The place smelled closed up. I had been gone a week. I went to the windows and opened them a few inches to admit some air.

I don’t remember turning the lights on, but I must have. I think I gave her a tour of the place, both bedrooms, the kitchen, showed her the closets.

I asked her if she wanted something to drink. I have forgotten what she said. Maybe she wanted a glass of water.

Anyway, she was in the bedroom with her suitcase and I was in the kitchen when it happened. There was a huge concussion, like a car crash, and I remember being swept off my feet and flying through the air … I don’t remember sound. No boom. None of that. Just the impact and flying through the air.

Then nothing.

When I woke up I was in this hospital bed, Admiral. How long have I been here?

A policeman came a while ago. I don’t know when. Or maybe a fireman. Someone in uniform. He told me she died instantly. The bomb was apparently in the dresser. He said the blast was centered in that corner of the bedroom. He said a wall that was blown out whacked me in the kitchen.

So Anna’s dead. And I can’t remember much. How long have I been here? When are they going to let me out?

Do you know who did it?

Don’t beat around the bush with me, Grafton. Tell it to me straight.

Who did it? Who put that bomb in my apartment?

Who murdered Anna?