Unmanned

CHAPTER EIGHT

Bickell erased the recording and told Cole what to do next. Cole left the house through the front door and waited on the porch until Bickell called out from inside. “Okay. Silent five count, then let ’er rip.”

Cole counted slowly to five, then knocked. Twice, like before.

“Keep your shirt on,” Bickell said again. “I’m coming.”

This time Cole refused the invitation to step inside. He tried to sound natural as he repeated the lines Bickell had fed him.

“No offense, but I’d be more comfortable doing this outside. We can walk while we talk.”

Bickell hemmed and hawed, playing the spider to the fly. But Cole didn’t give in, so Bickell finally came out onto the porch. Having concluded their performance for the recorder, they headed toward the lakeshore, where even on a chilly winter day distant motorboats were plowing the main channel, throwing plumes like snowmobiles. Once they were a safe distance from the house, Bickell got down to business.

“Let me ask you something. What makes you so sure this is all about the Agency?”

“It was Castle’s op.”

“He might have ordered up the bird, but there are plenty of people with wish lists in that part of the world. Privateers and fly-by-nighters. Sheep-dipped Special Forces platoons, green badgers with their own outfits, you name it. Down on the ground it’s a regular fucking carnival.”

“Whoa, whoa. Sheep-dipped?”

“Active military, but with a special security clearance so they can work directly for the Agency, or maybe for some green badger with his head up his ass.”

“And a green badger is …?”

“Cleared by the Agency, but not an Agency employee. A green badge gets you into the building at Langley. A blue badge means you work there.”

“Are you talking about contractors? Like Blackwater, or IntelPro?” Cole watched for a reaction, but Bickell was poker-faced.

“This is even murkier and more incestuous. Maybe it’s an ex-employee doing a contract job. And maybe he’s working with a contractor, or maybe he isn’t. Either way, green badgers can do shit that blue badgers can’t. If they’re caught on the wrong side of the border, well, hell, they’re not government employees, are they?”

“Plausible deniability.”

“They can also operate domestically. Right here at home. Places that are no-go for the Agency are always open season for them. Same with the contractors — the Blackwaters and IntelPros — except they operate out in the next orbit where things are even loopier. Not just different rules of engagement, no rules of engagement. The Wild West, Fort Apache, take your pick. The new frontier of covert warfare.”

“With the drones?”

“With everything. Firefights by proxy. Security checks on the home front. In some ops, half the guts get farmed out to some hireling, or to a bunch of converted nut jobs with M-16s. It’s a damn good business to be in, that’s for sure. When the Agency got rid of me, who do you think my first visitor was, one day after I got here?”

Cole shook his head.

“An international security consultant with two slots to fill. Offering triple what the Agency pays and twice the freedom. Before I even had time to say no, two more called. It’s great for the job market — No Spook Left Behind — but down on the ground?” He shook his head.

“A mess?”

“We had an op going last July, sheep-dipped unit near the border pulling an all-nighter on the prairie. They staked out the house of some former source who’d been tipping off our targets. Our Pred is at twelve thousand and I’m in the trailer, watching. Two hours before go time, eight bogeys show up in the opposite quadrant, moving in on the same party. Who are they? Fuck if we know, but before we can lift a finger they storm the house, clear every room, then leave our bad boy dead on his doorstep. Mission accomplished, but by who? Blue badgers? Green badgers? Contractors? We never did find out. They’re all out there, and every damn one of ’em has his own list of HVTs.”

“Who’s keeping tabs on them?”

“I asked that question a month before they sent me home. Took it all the way to the desk chief in Washington. Nobody would give me a straight answer. At first I thought they were stonewalling. Now I’m convinced they just didn’t know, which frankly kinda blows my mind. They’ve got a rough idea for numbers, maybe even names. But ops and targets? Spheres of influence? Or who’s shooting at who? Good luck with all that. So naturally you end up with competition — for sources, clients, results. And competition breeds mistakes.”

“Who’s making them?”

“Who isn’t?”

“And that’s what happened with my missile strike?”

“I’m not the one who can answer that. I just know it’s more complicated than Wade fucking Castle going rogue, or getting his coordinates wrong. He’s king of the hill for this kind of shit, the Agency’s tech guru on both sides of the water. No way it’s just a matter of him being duped by a single source.”

“Or maybe that’s what you’ve been told to say.”

“What I was told to say was absolutely nothing. I erased the goddamn tape to cover my own ass as much as yours.”

“It’s not like you’ve given me much.”

“I’m getting to that. The name of an op, for starters. Wade Castle’s baby from day one. Magic Dimes. As in dropping the dime. You watch cop shows, right?”

“Ratting somebody out, you mean? Like a drug dealer snitching to the feds?”

“Except these dimes do the snitching for you. That’s what gives them their mojo.”

“Are you talking about tracking beacons?”

“No bigger than a silver dollar, even though they’re called dimes. Slide one under somebody’s couch and he’ll get a rocket down his chimney faster than you can say Osama bin Laden.”

“That was how Castle marked his targets, by getting his sources to drop the dimes?”

“Some of them, anyway.”

“There was no beacon signal of any kind coming from the place we hit.”

“Not that you knew. When an Agency bird did the shooting, he let the Pred crews in on the signal telemetry. Whenever the Air Force was involved he kept it all to himself, to protect his sources. His only contact with the flight crews was by chat.”

“That’s how it was with me.”

Bickell nodded. “Castle likes to play things neat and simple, with minimal interference.”

“Then how’d things get so fucked up?”

“Partly because the beacon program grew faster than he wanted. Even before he could set up the first shot, somebody upstairs decided to make it a sort of pilot project, a trial run for interagency use. And not just for overseas use.”

“For using it here, you mean? Homing beacons for Predators?”

“Or for any other piece of hardware you might use to carry out remote surveillance on a suspect.”

“So, for the FBI, too, then.”

“Plus any of our so-called trusted partners in the private sector. Because if you’re not acting officially, then who needs a warrant?”

“Sounds sketchy.”

“If you want sketchy, read the PATRIOT Act. Enough loopholes to fly a whole squadron of Predators through. Castle was pissed when he saw where this was headed. And he only got more bent out of shape once he saw how wonderful everything was going with the Magic Dimes.”

“Like with my op.”

“Him and me both. I started asking myself what went wrong as soon as I saw the casualty report. Castle dropped off the radar shortly after that. I never did get his take on it. They sequestered him somewhere. Days of debriefing. All I ever heard before they canned me was a name. Castle’s source, the guy he chose to place his beacons.”

“And?”

Bickell eyed him closely, as if still weighing whether to take the plunge.

“Mansur Amir Khan. A little shit Pashtun smuggler, everything from soup to nuts. Back and forth across the border with pack mules and bodyguards, maybe a dozen fighters on his payroll. Not a hell of a lot going on upstairs, but apparently he knew where a lot of the Indian chiefs liked to hide out. Maybe ’cause he was supplying them with something, I don’t know. Ammo, meds, gasoline. He was a conduit for everybody.”

“So he was the problem?”

“This is where it gets complicated.” Great, thought Cole, already overstuffed with information. He was the one who needed a recorder, not the Agency. “Not long after Castle starts dealing with him, Mansur becomes a very popular fellow in certain circles. By then of course he’s got a handful of Castle’s magic dimes jingling in his pocket. Somebody else got wind of it and wanted in on the action, and they had the money to outbid us.”

“The other side?”

“It’s not that simple. Could have been anyone from an al Qaeda groupie to some wild-ass green badger looking to make his name with a big hit. Or maybe just a local warlord looking to rub out a rival. Whoever it was, Castle’s dimes started rolling all over the floor, meaning he had to either track them down or shut down Mansur.”

“If he thought the targets were iffy, why keep calling in strikes?”

“Castle’s the only one who can answer that. But first you’d have to find him. And when you do, my old station chief would be much obliged if you’d let him in on the secret.”

“He’s missing? Even to the CIA?”

“Only for guys at my level. This kind of info gets compartmentalized beyond belief once a fuckup occurs. Especially when somebody’s name starts showing up on consultants’ enemies lists. Because you weren’t the only one who got burned by these mistakes.”

“IntelPro, you mean.”

“They’re one possibility. Tricorn Associates. Overton Security. Those are two more. Plus any sheep-dipped outfit of mercenaries you care to name. Just about any of them might have been hung out to dry if a beacon got misused.”

“So what’s the Agency saying — that he’s gone?”

“What, admit they’ve lost the handle on one of their top-level experts?” Bickell shook his head. “Besides, someone inside is bound to know where he is. Someone always does. You know anything about that fucked-up game they play over there, bushkazi?”

“The one on horseback, yeah.”

“Like polo for barbarians, except instead of a ball they’ve got a dead goat, with both sides trying to keep it. Sometimes the goat gets torn to shreds before either side wins. Well, right now, from what I hear, Castle’s the dead goat in a big game of Agency bushkazi. So good luck if you think you’re going to find him. The way this one’s going, you’ll be more likely to bump into Mullah Omar.”

“I wasn’t exactly expecting to run him down.”

“No, but you might find Mansur. A year ago, when things started to get a little hot for his family, he supposedly used some of his Agency winnings and consular contacts to buy his way out of Dodge. Got a one-way ticket to Europe and a Canadian visa.”

“So he’s in Canada now?”

“Was. Disappeared about a day after the Agency went looking for him. No trace for months, then he supposedly turned up down in Baltimore.”

Jesus, Cole thought. Was everyone in Baltimore?

“So they found him?”

“Tried to. Or had the Bureau try for them, jurisdictional rules and all that. No luck.”

“Well, if the FBI couldn’t find him—”

“Maybe they weren’t looking very hard.”

“Why, ’cause they hate the Agency? The whole rivalry thing?”

Bickell shook his head. “Cooperation’s better than ever on stuff like this. I’m betting my people made a decision at some point that they didn’t want to look very hard. Far better to hear that a cursory check showed no sign of him, so thanks for trying and call off the dogs until further notice, pretty please. Or maybe they found him but hushed it up. Put him under surveillance. By request, of course. Either way, it’s more cover-up, more stuff no one would talk about. Not when I asked, anyway.”

“Is that why they pushed you out? For asking about Mansur and Magic Dimes?”

“Plus some other shit. Even when Wade was still active there was all kinds of noise around the Agency’s Predator program, so I’d already been asking questions.”

“Noise?”

“Funny stuff nobody could or would explain. Not even Castle, and he was supposed to be running the show.”

“Like what?”

“People coming in and out of our ops center who I’d never seen before. They’d nod at Wade like they were buddies and he’d nod back.”

“Green badgers? Blue badgers?”

“No badgers. And no names, far as I could tell. I’d ask Wade and he’d say something about it being strictly need-to-know, so butt out, but I could tell he didn’t like ’em, either. So I averted my eyes, at least for a while. Then I asked the station chief. He told me to drop it, let Wade handle it. So I let Wade handle it, and Wade disappeared.” He shook his head, gazing out across the lake. “Tell me something, in all your ops did you ever get any unexplained visitors to your chat group?”

“You mean besides you guys?”

“Hell, we were OGA. Duly announced and reporting for duty. Might as well have been displaying an Agency icon every time we posted. No, I mean true interlopers, guys who might ask a question out of nowhere, with a handle you’d never seen before, then slink off into the ether.”

Cole thought about it. Drew a blank.

“Don’t recall any. Nobody beyond the usual crowd, from Al Udeid on down.”

“Nobody with the handle Lancer?”

The name stopped him, literally. He stood still on the path. A bird called out from overhead, and a droplet of melted snow smacked his forehead just as he locked on to a memory.

“Yeah, there was a Lancer. Just once. Or once that I can remember.” Bickell was intense now, staring straight at him. “It was during our recon at Sandar Khosh, the month before the missile strike.”

“Remember what he asked?”

“No. But I remember wondering who the hell it was, just for a second. His handle popped up, he asked one or two questions, then he vanished, just like you said. It happened so fast I didn’t think about it again. Until now.”

“I got him pretty regular. So did everybody in our shop. I asked Wade who the hell he was.”

“And?”

“Told me he was a privileged guest, nothing more. After that I always wondered if he was bird-dogging you guys as well. Your CO never mentioned him?”

“Nothing. Before or after.”

“Curious.”

“You think it’s related to all this stuff?”

“Hell, everything’s related. But how? No idea. Just another part of the noise.”

They walked on, footsteps crunching frosted mud in the shadows along the shoreline before they turned back into sunlight. Bickell looked up at the sky. A small private plane, a Cessna or a Piper, soared across the far side of the lake. They watched for a few seconds before it veered through a notch in the gray hills, leaving behind only the faint drone of its engine as it disappeared over the horizon.

During the pause another possibility occurred to Cole: Maybe this whole conversation was part of a setup, and the whole scene with the tape recorder had been for show. Bickell could be wired, transmitting the conversation to some guy in a van a few hundred yards away. Steve and he would then be intercepted before they could even make it to the end of the dirt road. But to what purpose? He couldn’t think of one, so he kept asking questions.

“This guy Mansur — why Baltimore?”

Bickell shrugged.

“I wondered, too. It’s not like there’s any Little Kabul down there, someplace where he might blend in. Only a handful of Afghans in the city, although one of them is a brother of Hamid Karzai, president of the fucking country. Owns a bunch of restaurants there.” Cole raised an eyebrow, but Bickell waved him off. “It was checked. No connection. Besides, that’s not exactly the low profile they wanted for Mansur. All I can figure is that there must be a sponsor nearby, somebody who helps keep an eye on him.”

“Like IntelPro?”

Bickell narrowed his eyes.

“What makes you keep mentioning them?”

“They’re located down there, aren’t they?”

“Maybe you’re more on the ball than I thought. But the only thing the Bureau dug up locally was the name of a Mexican takeout where Mansur was stuffing burritos for a while. Taco Rojo.”

“The Red Taco?”

“All I got. It’s all the Bureau had, too, if that’s any comfort, and he no longer works there.”

“Why would they ever put him out in public like that?”

“No idea. Unless he was being used as some kind of bait. Which could also explain why the Bureau would back off — to keep from fucking up somebody else’s mousetrap.”

“Then who’s the mouse?”

“Good question. But it tells me that Mansur is findable for anyone with the means, motive, and opportunity.”

They continued walking in silence until they reached the edge of the property. Bickell stopped, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and looked straight at Cole.

“If you do happen to find him, don’t waste your breath asking about Wade Castle. He was using a cryptonym over there. Hector. Like the Greek warrior.”

“The dead Greek warrior. I saw the movie.”

“And Castle read the book. But I guess he doesn’t believe in jinxes. Another word of advice. The moment you hit the trail I’m supposed to give the Agency a heads-up. They want a fix on your departure time, a starting point for further tracking. I can fudge it by maybe twenty minutes to give you a head start, but anything more and I’m playing with fire. So don’t stop for lunch, don’t stop for gas, and by all means avoid the toll roads. Too many cameras rolling at the collection booths.”

More little Predators, Cole thought, parked and waiting.

“Thanks.”

“Obviously I won’t tell them I mentioned Mansur, much less Hector. But if you head down to Baltimore, watch yourself. Just because the Bureau says they never found him doesn’t mean they don’t know where he is. For all I know they’ve staked him out with another goddamn beacon in his pocket, trolling him in the water to see who comes sneaking up from behind. Turn up on their radar and you’ll be seen as a potential member of the competition, and you don’t want the Agency or the Bureau thinking of you that way.”

“Now if I just knew one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Whether you’re really trying to help me, or baiting a trap.”

Bickell smiled. “Welcome to my world, Captain Cole. The way things work in this business, I could sincerely be intending to do you a favor while really doing the opposite, and neither of us would be the wiser.”

“Great.”

“You get used to it, believe it or not. If you’re good at it.”

“And how do you get good at it?”

“By keeping your own counsel, trusting only yourself. A cliché, yes, but only because it’s good advice. The moment somebody tells you he’s on your side, you better start looking for reasons he’d want to do you in.”

“Sounds like a recipe for ending up alone.”

“Guilty as charged.” Bickell spread his arms to encompass the empty lawn. “My wife moved out seven years ago.” He walked a few more feet in silence, a crust of ice crunching beneath his feet. “Back when I bought this place I figured someday all I’d be doing is hunting, fishing, tooling around on the water. But look at that boat of mine — falling apart, stem to stern. I haven’t taken it out since August. Still, the life has its rewards. You’ll see.”

“I’ll keep that in mind when they take me in for questioning.”

Bickell chuckled, but Cole didn’t join in. Bickell turned back toward the house, signaling that he was ready to bring this to a close. Cole had one more question.

“So what’s your theory on Castle, then? You lived and breathed this stuff right there with him. Where do you think he’s gone?”

Bickell stopped. He stroked his chin and looked hard at Cole, as if mulling whether to say anything more.

“Knowing him, and knowing how many players eventually dipped their fingers into this pie at one time or another, I’d say he’s here.”

“Back in the States?”

Bickell nodded grimly.

“Why?”

“Because this isn’t about what happened over there anymore. It’s about what’s happening here. Right now. And he’s determined to be part of it.”

“For which side?”

“His own.”

“Is that the same as the Agency’s?”

“You tell me. No one in Langley will. Why the hell else would I be talking to you?” He looked down at his watch. “I’d say it’s time you got moving. And seeing as how the clock just started, you’d be best advised to walk straight around the house. Stay as far to the right of the drive as you can so you won’t trip the sensor. The alarm will show up on the recording, and the next sound I want them to hear is me coming back through the front door, twenty minutes from now.”

“Much obliged to you.”

“Hey. I never said shit. That’s your version to anyone who asks. And the clock is ticking, Captain Cole.”

Cole nodded and left at double time. By the time he reached the front yard he was sprinting.