The Disposable Man

Chapter 5

The entrance to the CIA is disarmingly placid. A large sign off of Virginia Route 123 announces its presence, the initial access road is empty, treelined and free of any obvious security, and when the first man-made obstacle is encountered, it consists solely of a kiosk equipped with a camera and a loudspeaker. I announced myself there, showed my badge to the camera as requested, and proceeded to a visitors’ center farther down the road. Only then, leaving my car to enter the small building, did I glimpse my final destination at the end of a woodsy corridor-gray, massive, and studded with antennae.

The security people behind the counter were polite and efficient, dressed in cheap uniform jackets decorated with identification tags listing numbers and letters only-no names. I was asked to fill out forms, to explain once more my purpose for being there, and was issued a parking pass and a visitor’s badge. A phone call was made to the main building, and I was given directions to the parking lot opposite “the old main entrance.”

The sun and the heat were back, making the surrounding forest shimmer in the haze of hot air bouncing off the parked cars and sticky asphalt. As I slammed my door in the VIP lot and squinted up at the monolith across from me, I was struck by its IBM-gothic harshness-all brutal, straight cement lines and jutting angles, punctuated by row upon row of blank, characterless windows.

To one side, in startling contrast, was a statue of Nathan Hale-the twenty-one-year-old Revolutionary spy caught on his first time out-standing with a rope around his neck under some shade trees. Either the guys behind that choice had seen patriotism and nobility where I also saw amateurism and failure, or someone with a wicked sense of humor had been given too much leash.

Through the wide bank of glass doors, I entered an enormous marble lobby, freezing cold and soaring high, buttoned in place by the CIA’s oversized seal, mounted like a religious icon into the floor before me. The reverent tone was picked up by a lone statue of founder William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a glassed-in honor book of CIA dead, and a wall-mounted excerpt from St. John’s famous gospel, “The truth shall make you free.” There was a certain majesty to all this self-esteem, along with a sense that perhaps too much was being made of it.

A small woman, her graying hair in a tight bun, stepped forward from a distant row of elaborate turnstiles to greet me. “Lieutenant Gunther?” she asked pleasantly, extending a hand. She didn’t introduce herself.

“You step in past the first barrier,” she explained, escorting me up to one of the turnstiles and entering what looked like a cow pen for humans, “and place your visitor’s badge into the slot,” whereupon the bar behind her rose to lock her in. “After the computer has processed the badge’s information,” she continued as the bar before her ducked out of the way, “you can proceed. But,” she smiled broadly, turning on her heel and holding up her identification, “don’t forget your badge.”

I followed suit indulgently, half wondering how much coded information I was sharing, and joined her on the other side.

She tapped my breast pocket. “Great. Just clip it there for the rest of your stay, and follow me.”

We climbed a flight of four steps, and turned left into a broad hallway.

“Impressive lobby,” I commented.

She laughed. “A little like a mausoleum, if you ask me. There’s a newer entrance that’s much friendlier. I can show it to you later, if you like.”

“Far from Nathan Hale?”

“Right-the bearer of mixed messages. Still, I suppose there’s a lot of truth to that, if you think about it.”

She was right, of course, which made me feel a little guilty about my instinctive first reaction.

“You work with Mr. Snowden?” I asked as we turned right into a second hallway.

“Off and on. I’m sort of a go-fer-more fun than being a secretary.”

“And what does he do, exactly?”

She gave me a bright, disarming smile. “We don’t often get people this far into the building who don’t know why they’re here.”

Touché, I thought, and dropped it.

We were now walking alongside a long row of large oil portraits.

She noticed my interest. “All the past directors.” She pointed to Richard Helms. “That’s where I came in, under the last of the patricians-or the last of them that acted the part.”

“Is that good news or bad?” I asked.

She shrugged and answered freely, showing none of the coyness she’d just displayed. “Neither, I suppose. Like all bosses, they’ve varied in quality. Casey loved the job too well; Turner hated it. Bush was my favorite. He was the nicest.”

We entered an elevator at the end of the corridor and rode to the seventh floor. When the doors slid open, I was surprised at the cheerfulness of the decor-pleasant lighting, soothing carpeting and walls. And every door we passed was painted a different color.

Again, my guide anticipated my question before I asked it. “It all used to be battleship gray, as you’d expect. This happened almost overnight. Scuttlebutt has it someone was paid a fortune to suggest that brighter colors make for a happier workplace. I’m not complaining about the results, though. Here we are.”

She gestured to a door labeled “7-25J”-none of the doors had names on them-and entered without knocking, ushering me into a windowless room that to the very last detail looked stolen from an upscale hotel, with a blank computer filling in for the TV set.

“Mr. Snowden will be with you shortly,” she said and left me alone.

In fact, it wasn’t all that shortly. I got to familiarize myself with my fashionably bland surroundings for fifteen minutes before a side door opened and a slender man with thinning hair and dark-rimmed glasses entered, a single folder clutched to his chest like a shield. I guessed Gil Snowden to be in his mid-fifties, and my instincts told me he’d been waiting me out on the other side of the door, a notion suggested by the sole mirror in the room looking suspiciously like the one-way observation window we had back at the PD.

The possibility didn’t predispose me to like him.

He gave me a limp, moist handshake before officiously barricading himself behind the dark wooden desk. “Lieutenant Gunther,” he spoke in the same sleepy voice he’d used on the phone, “it was very nice of you to come down on such short notice. I hope you had a pleasant flight?”

“I drove.”

Snowden had been pretending to study the contents of the folder. My terse reply made him look up. “Everything go all right?”

I tried jarring him a little. “Till I got mugged last night.”

He smiled sympathetically. “Yes. So I heard. I am sorry. Not the best introduction to the city. I’m glad you got off lightly.”

I was seized by the same chill I’d felt before being ambushed the night before. “How did you hear about it?” I asked. “The local cops made it sound like it was right up there with a parking ticket.”

His smile didn’t change, but he sat back in his chair, exuding a smugness I’d missed earlier. “We have different interests from them.”

“In me or the man who tried to knife me?”

“Both, actually. But you’re sitting here now. I don’t know where he is.”

“Implying you know who he is.”

He waved a hand carelessly. “It doesn’t matter. What counts is that he missed.”

I shifted my gaze to the wall behind him for a moment, rethinking my position. It was in Snowden’s interest to play up the Big Brother image, regardless of what he knew, but he obviously did know something, and that alone gave weight to some of the paranoid fantasies that had kept me awake last night.

“Is the man we found in Vermont connected to the mugger?”

“Possibly. Part of that depends on what you can tell me.”

I looked at him incredulously. “What I can tell you? We’ve got nothing on that case. I came down here so you could tell me something.”

Snowden shook his head and laughed softly. “Lieutenant, forgive me, but I bothered to find out a little about you. Very tenacious man-‘Like a dog with a bone,’ from what I heard. Don’t you think ‘nothing’ is understating things slightly?”

I took my time answering, suddenly suspicious. He’d dug into my background, he knew about the incident last night, and his own people had visited Hillstrom’s lab to check out the corpse. Yet now he was pleading ignorance. It was possible he didn’t know how little we’d discovered, or that he was concerned we might know more than we did. More likely, we’d stumbled over something we hadn’t yet recognized. If so, nothing he’d said so far had made me want to use him as a confidant.

I spoke slowly, hoping my genuine befuddlement would help hide the little I planned to hold back. “As far as I know, we have a dead floater with no identifiers. We don’t have a single lead-nothing. We put feelers out everywhere-you know that-but we’ve gotten nothing back. That’s why your phone call was so interesting. You did say you’d help me put this case to bed.”

I left it short and simple, giving him a choice to either share his knowledge or nail me with the omission of the tattooed toes, the buckle knife, or the fact that we’d traced the rental car to Logan Airport.

Not surprisingly, I suppose, he ducked the choice entirely, leaving me as up in the air as before. “Lieutenant,” he said, leaning forward and resting his forearms on the desk. “Around here, we are so instinctively suspicious of everyone and everything, we often end up confusing the very people we’re supposed to be working with. What I should’ve said on the phone was that we would put this thing to bed-take it off your hands, so to speak.”

This time, I didn’t need to fake any confusion. “You’re allowed to do that? Operate within the country?”

Snowden was already straightening in his chair, smiling and waving his hand to interrupt. “No, no. Of course not. I didn’t mean it that way. Let me explain. You have a dead body and no leads to follow. I happen to know that’s with good reason. The man you found was simply deposited in your area-pure happenstance. He doesn’t have the remotest connection to Brattleboro or Vermont or even the U.S., for that matter. He was a foreign national, a man we’ve been watching for years, and he was taken out by other non-U.S. citizens. His ending up in Vermont was a fluke. I’m not asking you to drop the case or even to tiptoe around anything. You can beat the bushes all you want. I’m just saying you won’t find anything. My comment about putting the case to bed was a clumsy way of recommending you don’t waste too much overtime on this one. But it’s up to you. I am sorry about the poor phrasing-too many years working in Washington.”

I just stared at him, a response he obviously hadn’t anticipated. After an awkward silence, he added, “After all, what’s to be gained? Your job, like mine, is to protect and to serve. The people who killed this man are long gone, so no one needs protection from them, and running around for weeks discovering that fact won’t serve anyone, least of all your taxpayers. Letting this one slip to the back pages will save you a lot of aggravation, and if things work out the way I think they will, it won’t be too long anyway before I’ll be calling you with some news that’ll satisfy everyone.”

“Meaning the CIA will locate his killer or killers abroad and hold them accountable?”

“Something like that. I’ll give you enough that it’ll look like a real-life spy thriller. ’Course, it’ll be a bit on the vague side. But the locals should get a kick out of playing a minor role in some international intrigue.”

I gave him an acquiescing smile, now absolutely positive I wasn’t going to play ball with him. “Sort of amazing, isn’t it, you getting me all the way down here just to tell me not to waste taxpayer money? This kind of thing happen often?”

Snowden became very still. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“That you make such an effort to tell a local cop to lay off. I mean, let’s face it, you people aren’t the only ones who’re overly suspicious by nature. I’m a little that way myself. Why didn’t you just let us charge around till we ran out of gas?”

He let out a small sigh. “I can see my homework about you was pretty accurate. Look, I won’t go into details-there are some national security angles I can’t divulge-but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that your fading away quietly would be a big help to us. I meant what I said about doing what you want, though. Despite what the media says, we don’t mess with the Constitution. But what you found is a tiny fragment of something we’ve been working on for years. Kicking up a lot of dust won’t do you any good, and it could make things harder for us, so I guess I’m asking you to look at the big picture, and ask yourself if searching for something that isn’t there is in anyone’s best interest.”

“And I’m to do this totally on faith, even though you won’t tell me anything because of national security?”

He laid his hands flat on the table, his smile erased by the tone of my voice. “Well, apparently not.” He rose to his feet. “Lieutenant, I guess you’ll just have to do what you have to do, for whatever reasons. I was hoping for a little interagency cooperation, but maybe those days are gone. It’s becoming that kind of world-everybody covering his ass, and to hell with what’s good for the nation. Too bad.”

He crossed the small room and pulled open the door. The same woman who’d escorted me here was standing in the hallway, apparently summoned by mysterious means.

Snowden nodded to me as I passed him, but didn’t offer his hand, which was just as well. I might’ve been tempted to tear it off. “Sorry to have wasted your time, Lieutenant. Have a safe trip back.”

It was dark. The rain outside hammered on the skylight over our bed with a comforting futility. I was lying face down on the bed, a large towel beneath me, and Gail was straddling my hips, alternately oiling and massaging my back, which was sore from hours of driving in lousy weather, not to mention the odd knife fight.

“So what do you think you’ve stepped into?” she asked, bearing down.

“No ghost of a notion. I ran it by Tony, but he’s as confused as I am. We can’t tell if they know everything and are being cute, or know almost nothing and want to know more. Snowden basically told me to lay off the investigation, but there again, that could’ve been just to fire me up. One thing is for sure-he lied about Boris Malik, or whatever his name is. Told me he’d been dumped here out of convenience-a foreigner killed by other foreigners now out of the country-and that finding any evidence, or linking the case to anyone or any place local would be impossible. We know that’s bullshit, since whoever did the dumping knew about the quarry and how to approach it.”

Gail paused to apply more oil. “Which leaves you back where you started?”

“Not quite,” I admitted reluctantly.

She resumed her handiwork along the tender back of my neck, forcing me to reach back and stop her.

“Ease up a bit. Something else happened down there,” I continued. “You probably would’ve heard about it soon anyhow, the way news travels. I was mugged by a guy with a knife. Nothing much happened,” I added quickly to her quiet intake of breath. “He came at me, I threw him off, and then he disappeared, right after he chopped me in the neck. But I’m having trouble believing it was as random as the cops’re claiming.”

She stretched out next to me to look into my face. “You sure that was all of it? Just a near thing?”

I kissed her forehead. “Promise. I kicked him in the balls, and he took off. The neck’s a little sore is all.”

She laid her head on the towel and closed her eyes briefly, one hand still stroking my back. I understood her concern. I’d almost been killed by a knife a few years back, and when she’d been raped, her attacker had used a knife to torment her. Such symbols had become evil icons to her, as had sharp noises in the night, the need for locked doors, and a wariness of things implied but perhaps not meant. They represented a skittish undercurrent beneath an otherwise hard-driving, intelligent, utterly self-possessed exterior.

I kissed her again. “Thanks for the back rub.”

Her eyes reopened. “Want more?”

“No. That did the trick.”

There was a long pause before she asked, “So what made this not a random mugging?”

“I don’t know. For one thing, it happened at the Korean War Memorial. If I were a mugger, I wouldn’t’ve been skulking around a totally empty area, probably famous for its police coverage. For another, I never heard him coming. I just happened to turn around to look at an airplane flying over. And finally, Snowden knew all about it early the next morning-at least he seemed to.”

Gail raised up to prop her head in her hand. “He knew about it? How?”

“That’s what I asked him. He pulled the all-seeing-eye routine, implying he even knew who the mugger was.”

“Why would he tell you that?”

“To impress me, to hoodwink me, to scare me. You name it. Whatever it is, it worked. I left his office so full of theories I had no idea which one might be right. We’ve practiced disinformation at the department now and then, either to flush someone out or to get the press to cut us some slack, but this took the cake.”

“But why go to all the trouble?” Gail asked.

“Specifically? I have no idea,” I answered. “But it keeps boiling down to a single common denominator. Regardless of whether the CIA is hoping we’ll drop it or pursue it, we’ve obviously stepped into something pretty interesting, and I would love to find out what the hell it is-and why the FBI is apparently also being kept in the dark.”

I waited for Ron and J.P. to squeeze themselves into my two office chairs, one wedged between a couple of filing cabinets, the other shoved under a tiny side table loaded down with files. Each man knew to move slowly and cautiously, having suffered paper landslides in the past.

“You both get the memo on my trip to DC?” I asked.

J.P. nodded. Ron asked, “How real is the CIA connection?”

“Real enough, not that we can do anything about it right now. For the moment, I’m pretending they don’t even exist. What did you two dig up while I was gone?”

Ron started off, cradling a thick folder in his lap, which he patted apologetically. “Not much on the paper trail. All the inquiries we sent out are still dangling, including the ones to Canada. INS and DEA have nothing on their books. I drove to Boston to look over the airline passenger lists personally, but Boris Malik doesn’t show up anywhere, meaning he either used another name, or he picked up the car at the airport as a decoy. In the three hours before he rented the car, planes came in from all over the place, including Moscow, but without a name, I don’t guess it matters. I kept the lists just in case another alias crops up, but otherwise, it’s a dead end.”

“You talk to the rental people?” I asked.

“Yeah, but there again… The girl who did the paperwork recognized him, but she couldn’t remember if he had luggage or not, or if he said where he was headed. She wasn’t even sure if he was alone. She did say he had an accent. It was the only reason she remembered him at all-’cause they had such a hard time communicating.”

“What about the credit card?”

“Counterfeit. The charge went through to some poor bastard in Illinois. The name on the card was Malik’s.”

“He didn’t ask for any maps or directions?”

Ron shook his head.

I looked at J.P. “You fare any better?”

He smiled, despite the absence of a file folder of any size. “I think so. I got two items linking the car trunk to the dead man. The first is a definite blood match, and the second might give us the leg up we’ve been looking for, although to give credit where it’s due, one of the crime lab guys discovered it. Remember the debris collected from Boris’s hair and clothes? Most of it was pond scum, but there was a single leaf fragment that caught this guy’s eye. He’s an amateur botanist-studied it in college-and this thing looked like nothing he’d ever seen. So instead of just sending it down the pipeline for someone else to figure out weeks from now, he took it to a consultant after work. Turns out it came from a ginkgo tree-a Ginkgo biloba, to be exact-native to China, so it’s pretty rare.”

He was about to continue, which I knew he could do for a quarter hour if properly stimulated, but I was too curious to wait. “How rare?” I asked.

J.P. blinked at me a couple of times, caught off guard. “I don’t know-maybe a couple of hundred in the state. But that’s not really the point. See, these trees aren’t like most. They’re distinctively sexed. Male trees are separate from female trees.”

I began to smile, despite my impatience, and decided to leave him alone.

“When I was going through the trunk of the rental car,” he continued, “I collected what turned out to be a tiny sample of flesh from a ginkgo seed, which is unique to the female. It was gooey and didn’t smell too good. I didn’t know what it was then, of course, except that it was some sort of plant, but after the leaf was identified, I drove it up to the lab yesterday afternoon, just before quitting time, and they confirmed it.”

“Which leads us where?” I asked belatedly, realizing he’d come to an end.

“I don’t know yet, but if we could locate all the female ginkgo trees in the immediate area, it might give us a location.” He hesitated a moment. “Of course, that could be easier said than done. I was going to start calling a few local naturalists, botanists, and the like. See what I could find.”

I raised a finger. “I have a better idea. Come with me.”

Newfane, Vermont, is about twelve miles northwest of Brattleboro on Route 30, a broad, beautiful, winding road that follows the meandering West River up the valley toward the ski slopes of the southern Green Mountains. During foliage season, every October, the road fills with out-of-state cars and buses “from away,” crowded with tourists soaking in the idyllic mixture of hills, trees, and sun-dappled water. Most of these people make a stop at Newfane village-to shop, take pictures, gather leaves, and walk around a quaint clutter of ancient white clapboard buildings bordering a huge green commons complete with church, courthouse, and meeting hall.

This, over time, has helped transform Route 30 into one of the major non-interstate arteries into the state’s center, and make Newfane a stepping-off point to many inland destinations. Which is why I immediately drove J.P. up there.

Just south of the village proper, across from Rick’s Tavern, was the Newfane Greenhouse, one of the best nurseries in the area and-what interested me most at the moment-a favorite destination for the upwardly mobile. I was counting on the ginkgo’s rarity to translate into an appropriately high price tag-and on the greenhouse’s staff to know who could afford one. J.P.’s notion of chasing down naturalists hadn’t been bad, but no one I’d ever met in that line had ever had two dimes to rub together. I was hoping the ginkgo was less a natural phenomenon and more an upper-class commodity.

It wasn’t too busy when we arrived. The summer was winding down, and while I was still impressed by the activity in the parking lot, it was still less than half-full.

J.P. and I got out of the car, looking out of place in our coats and ties, and walked into the only building that wasn’t a plastic-sheeted greenhouse. A young man greeted us from behind the service counter. “You need any help?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re looking for some information about a really rare tree-a ginkgo. You know anything about them?”

He pulled a face and shook his head, smiling. “I can handle the run-of-the-mill stuff, but that sounds more like Jay’s department. Hang on a sec.”

He reached under the counter and retrieved a portable radio. “Jay?” he said after keying the mike.

“Yeah,” came the answer after a pause.

“I got two gentlemen here asking about ginkgo trees.”

“Be right there.”

The young man replaced the radio with a laugh. “You must’ve pushed a button with that one. He’s knee-deep in mud, working out back.”

A woman approached with a tray full of small plants, and we faded back so the clerk could work the cash register. A few minutes later, an impressively tall, skinny man wearing a baseball cap and an open face ambled into the building, rubbing his hands on a mud-encrusted pair of khakis.

He smiled broadly as he drew near. “Hi. I’m Jay Wilson. You the ones interested in the ginkgos?”

I walked with him to an unpopulated corner of the room, speaking quietly. “Probably not in the sense you’d like, I’m afraid. We’re from the Brattleboro police-sort of on a research trip.”

Wilson’s bright disposition remained undaunted. “Neat. What do you want to know?”

“I guess for starters, do you sell them?”

“I do when I can find ’em. They’re pretty hard to get. Even as high-priced as they are, they move like crazy.”

“So there’re a lot of them around?” J.P. asked, disappointed.

“Oh, no. Offhand, I’d say fifteen to twenty tops in the whole county. Their rarity’s part of the appeal. Not that they’re fragile or anything,” he added quickly, as if we were customers. “They’re quite hardy-grow almost anywhere. Interesting tree, actually, and a real beauty. One of the oldest on the face of the earth. I read they were, around two hundred and thirty million years ago, native to North America, which is ironic, since their only native habitat these days is eastern China. That’s what makes ’em so pricey.”

“I gather they come in male and female varieties,” I commented.

He seemed to dismiss the idea. “Well, they do, but that doesn’t really matter. People only buy the males. It’s all I ever sell.”

We both stared at him. “Why?” J.P. finally asked.

“The females have seeds-orange grapey things about an inch long, coated with a messy pulp. They not only litter the ground, but they stink to high heaven-the pulp does. They’re famous for it.”

“How many females do you think are in Windham County?” I asked.

He considered that for a moment. “Probably no more than three or four, but that’s just a guess. They’re a little sneaky. For the first twenty to even fifty years, the males and females look pretty much the same. It’s only after they fruit that the females come out of the closet. So there’re probably several supposed males out there that’re getting ready to surprise their owners. I got called about one just recently. Guy wanted to know how to deal with the seeds. I told him he was screwed. Even picking them up won’t work, since they’re designed to break open when they land. The season only lasts six weeks, though, starting in late summer. I said he should try to work it to his advantage. Make it a selling point to his guests somehow. Asians actually eat the seeds-consider ’em a delicacy, after the pulp’s been removed-and they’re hot right now in the herbal medicine market. Supposed to treat everything from Alzheimer’s to hearing problems.”

He gave a sly smile. “They’re also sold as a sexual enhancer-that’s why I thought he could turn it into an advantage. He didn’t sound too convinced, though. Maybe he couldn’t figure out how to phrase it in the brochure.”

“Brochure for what?”

“He runs the Windham Hill Inn, just outside West Townshend.”