Blown (16 page)

Chapter 30

LANGLEY, 5:17 P.M.

“Carmichael’s been arrested
already
?” Cory Rinehart frowned. “I’m surprised. The BKA is usually less . . . resourceful.”

“Wally Aronson turned his old friend in,” Scottie replied dryly; he planned on kicking Wally the length of Europe for having done so. “Apparently Eric showed up on his doorstep begging for help.”

Rinehart glanced up from the cable he was reading. He’d had the good taste to remain in his own office down the hall from the DCI’s, which he’d rather ostentatiously locked before such witnesses as Dare Atwood’s weeping secretary and the Deputy Director for Operations, pending the arrival of Dare’s next of kin.
A daughter,
he’d told Scottie disbelievingly.
Lives somewhere in Miami. I didn’t know Dare was ever married.

“This thug sought out our COS Berlin?” he demanded now. “That’s interesting. Very.” Rinehart ran one of his small and rather delicate hands over his beautifully trimmed black hair. He was a spare man, compact and athletic, his clothes almost obsessively pressed; a former navy pilot, Scottie remembered. A tactical thinker trained to take out the incoming. Appearances mattered to Cory Rinehart; even his shoes were expensive and perfect.

“I’ve been thinking about this whole goddamn rigmarole. The idea that Atwood was running Carmichael alone—it doesn’t make sense. I can’t find a trace of any financial arrangements in her records. No suggestion that the two of them even communicated.”

The late DCI’s office door might be locked, Scottie reflected approvingly, but Rinehart had already used his key. “You think it’s possible . . . Wally Aronson was involved?”

“Not with Headquarters sanction,” Rinehart said quickly. “But if Carmichael knew him well enough to find his doorstep . . . it does suggest . . .”

“. . . a rogue operator,” Scottie finished. “Yes, I see your point. You want Aronson recalled?”

“That’s a job for the DDO.”
The Deputy Director for Operations.
In this case, Hal Rickler, spymaster to the nation’s spooks and one more person who’d demand admittance to Scottie’s dangerous circle of conspiracy. He could not have it.

Scottie sighed. “Remember who you are, Cory.
Acting Director.
You don’t have to explain a single one of your decisions to anybody now but the President.”

The casual reference to Jack Bigelow served as a reminder of exactly how delicate a business they were tossing like a football around the room.

“Will the BKA let us talk to him?” Rinehart demanded abruptly.

“Wally?”

“Carmichael.”

Scottie shrugged, uncertain how this might serve his ends. “It’s early days yet. We’re still negotiating jurisdiction. The Germans want to try him on murder charges. I think we ought to let them.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Rinehart demanded softly. “If the connection to the Agency’s Berlin station came up . . . the CIA would be held accountable for the destruction of half of downtown Berlin and the murder of Sophie Payne. We are
not
going to let that happen.”

“If you say so.” Scottie’s eyes were hooded. “What alternative would you suggest?”

“Extradite the bastard as soon as possible. Film his arrival in handcuffs on every major news channel nationwide. Hand the President a terrorist he can prosecute—and say fuck-all about where he came from.”

“But Eric will talk. On every major news channel.” Scottie eased back in his chair as though the prospect of his enemy babbling in a sort of political reality show held no terrors for him. “He’ll embarrass not only the CIA but the entire Administration. Jack Bigelow won’t thank you for that, Cory. He certainly won’t
appoint
you to fill Dare’s shoes on a permanent basis.”

“I never hoped for that,” Rinehart said.

Liar,
Scottie retorted silently.
You’ve wanted this job since you picked up your badge from Security thirteen years ago. I know your kind. I’ve recruited better men than you.

But when he spoke it was in a measured tone entirely free of the rancor flooding his veins.

“Aronson reports that Eric’s been roughed up. Somebody worked him over with a cleaver. It’d be a gift if he never survived his holding cell.”

Rinehart’s eyes—a clear and remorseless blue—betrayed no shock. “Could that be arranged?”

Was it possible, Scottie wondered with a vague uneasiness, that the A/DCI was willing to hand him so simple an avenue to power? Would Rinehart submit to lifelong blackmail, purely for a snatch at Dare Atwood’s private suite?

“Why don’t you send me to Berlin, Cory?” he suggested gently. “We need eyes on the ground. I know the key people at the BKA—and I can get access to Eric without leaving a trail.”

A smile flickered briefly over Cory Rinehart’s face. “Eric was one of
yours,
wasn’t he? Almost a son, people used to say.”

“I have two daughters. They’re all grown up now.”

Rinehart reached for a personnel file and hoisted it meaningfully. “I’ve been reading up on Carmichael. He was quite a CO. You gave him his last three postings, I think. Plums, all of them, Scottie. Strange that he’d betray you so completely. And you in the dark the whole time.”

The drift of the conversation was clear. If Wally Aronson’s friendship for the doomed man was suspect, then Scottie’s was career ending.

Very well,
he thought with distaste.
You scratch my back, Cory, and I’ll scratch out your eyes.

He rose. “Have you told Bigelow we’ve got Eric?”

“Yes. And also that you fired his wife.” Rinehart’s gaze locked with Scottie’s. “The President wasn’t happy about that. She’s his perfect hero.”

“And more compromised than anybody in the building.”

“Except yourself.”

Scottie raised one eyebrow. “Are you requesting my resignation, sir?”

“Not yet.” Rinehart dropped Eric’s folder back on his desk. “I want to see how you solve our problem in Berlin. Why don’t you leave tonight, Scottie?”

Chapter 31

MCLEAN, 6:37 P.M.

Josie O’Halloran lifted two twenty-five-pound bags of ice from the flatbed of Mike’s truck and carried the slippery weight, frigid against her breasts, into the service entrance of the store. Rainwater had pooled on the concrete floor and the glitter of a fish scale winked from the rusted drain at her feet, but the November chill flooding through the two narrow rooms cut the stench like a knife. The odor this afternoon was a stew of seawater and diesel fumes and good fresh fish, reminding Josie of the Boston docks and her father’s trawler heading for dawn on the Georges Bank. Forty-five years ago, maybe fifty, when she’d been a kid with dirty knees and corduroy pants her mother deplored. A different lifetime; and what would her mother think now if she saw Josie’s hardened hands, encased in plastic gloves as transparent as a proctologist’s, shoving the ice around the chars’ gills?
Waste of a good education,
she’d say bitterly.
For this we sent you to Manhattanville?

But her mother was dead eighteen years and Josie had learned in her refined Catholic women’s college exactly what it meant to be a child of the working class, a girl who got A’s but still smelled of the docks, no debutante with an MRS degree, Josie O’Halloran. The boys from Holy Cross and Villanova and Georgetown had figured it out, too: One look at her broad Irish face and red hair and blunt hands and they’d moved on to what Josie called the Kennedy Irish—the kind whose money and dark good looks made up for an entry stamp at Ellis Island. She’d left Manhattanville without the requisite diamond ring or the postgraduate tour of Europe but with the highest marks in her class.
Josie,
Sister Regina Mary had said a month before graduation,
there is a gentleman I’d like you to meet. You’re a good girl and a hard worker and I think it just possible he might offer you employment.

“That’s all of it, Jo,” Mike sang out from the open doorway. “Need anything else?”

“Nothin’ you can give me, sweetheart.” His young cheeks were flushed above the demonic goatee and for an instant she wanted to pinch them lovingly. Instead, she smiled and waved him back into his belching truck, wondering at what point men had become her sons and not her lovers. She was fifty-eight years old, she’d never lost her figure, she kept her hair styled and dyed; but maybe it was the men who’d changed, slipping back like a point in a riverbank her current had left behind forever. She saw most of them now as little boys, never much older than the two grandsons whose picture she kept on the ledge near the lobster tank, grinning out at her with all the wit and malice of the devil’s own.

She sighed and looked over Mike’s delivery: fresh bluepoints and Wellfleets, although who would buy them on a Monday was questionable—oysters on the half were a weekend commodity. Harpooned swordfish steaks, always a good seller. Your Dover sole. Your catfish and farm-raised salmon for the types who liked fish but refused to pay steak prices. Wild king fillets. Chesapeake Bay blue crab. Sea scallops and the tiny succulent rock shrimp that were never frozen before they arrived at O’Halloran’s Seafood, the kind Scottie Sorensen liked to buy.

The bell over the door jangled and Josie hurriedly reached for her heavy rubber apron. Sasha, her counter girl, had called in sick for the eighth time this month. “Just a sec,” she shouted. “I’ll be right with you.”

He was standing there when she appeared as though she’d conjured him, silver head bent toward the chilled glass of the lobster tank, completely absorbed by the antennae probing the slick surface. Scottie in his Bond Street raincoat. The one man she could never see as just a little boy.

He came almost weekly, but the sight of him still had the power to shift her heart up a gear.
He might offer you employment,
Sister Regina had said; and so he had. Employment in Beirut as his personal secretary, the job other women had drawn blood to win. Beirut in the mid-sixties, its last golden hours of pleasure before Eden’s fall, Beirut of the secret gardens and the ripe blushing fruit and the sex on the couches in the middle of the day. She had been Scottie’s secretary, his confidante, his bodyguard and muse. Occasional bedfellow. All-purpose dinner partner when cover required it. Chief shopper for whatever wife was currently in power. She had served Scottie Sorensen in a number of ways over the past thirty years and knew exactly what was essential: the things he wanted and the ways he got them. Even how he preferred his bluefish cooked.

“Hello, Jo,” he said without turning around. “How’re you keeping?”

“Well enough. And you?”

She did not have to ask whether the work was interesting. She listened to the radio and watched her TV. A man with a gun had killed the Director last night and nobody could say where he’d got to. She had never been one to beg for privileged information. He’d tell her soon enough.

“You realize,” he said casually, “that three of these monsters are eating a fourth alive.”

She couldn’t see the lethal drama played out in the tank—his head was blocking her view—but she’d caught the scene often enough. One lobster on its back, skinny legs flailing, while the others tore at its entrails.

“I flew those in from Bar Harbor on Saturday,” she said calmly. “Does the Latest like lobster?”

The Latest was what she’d always called Scottie’s wife; it had been too tiring to keep track of all their names.

“Loves it,” he replied, “but not tonight, Jo. I’m flying to Berlin in a few hours.”

“So you didn’t come to buy fish.”

His eyes met hers. “Are you alone?”

“Completely.”

“Then take off your apron and sit down. I have a job for you to do.”

Chapter 32

LANGLEY, 7:03 P.M.

When the buzzer sounded at the door of the vault, Raphael waited coolly for one of his acolytes to press the security release button. He remained on his barstool before the drafting table, his fine-boned left hand working with the metal stylus under the magnifying lens. No visitor was worth disturbing his concentration. It was essential that the pattern of wear on the forged Burmese chop replicate the hidden flaws deliberately placed on the original document by the immigration authorities in Rangoon. Raphael was legendary for his ability to ignore everything that was not essential to his trade.

Cuddy Wilmot, with whom Raphael had worked for the past three years on delicate and unspeakable business, was standing a few feet away from him. He felt the air change behind his back but did not glance in Cuddy’s direction.

Raphael was the Master. He resembled a charcoal figure touched out on canvas by the hand of Leonardo: the lithe curve of his form, the sweeping arc of his golden head. Only the wings, furled in silence, were missing.

He set down the stylus and pushed aside the lens. Flexed his fingers and sighed. Then he turned at last and looked at the man waiting quietly in the doorway.

Cuddy dipped his bespectacled face slightly; in supplication, Raphael liked to think. “Raphael. Would you have time to speak to me?”

He reviewed his mental log. Nearly ten hours of painstaking work lay ahead of him; the fact that it was late on a Monday was irrelevant. There was the voice-activated microphone his subordinates had embedded in the frame of a personal photograph the President would present to a Middle Eastern dictator, bound to be hung in the man’s office: The quality of the disguised wood grain would have to be checked by Raphael alone before it was delivered to the White House that night. The infrared landing lights for the unmarked airstrip in the Andes should be tested. The tiny camera he was supposed to plant in a female case officer’s lipstick was still waiting on a shelf, and the woman was due to fly out to Paris in three days. None of the objets d’art produced by the Office of Technical Services left Raphael’s shop without his personal approval. In less than seven years, he had gained an empire.

“Give me half an hour,” he said. And thus terminated Wilmot’s audience.

The Office of Technical Services had been known for years as “Q branch,” but it was gradually acquiring another name: Raphael’s Chapel. Most of the people who benefited from his perfection had no idea where he’d come from, or even if he had a last name. Raphael preferred it that way. He wore only black, as though prepared at any moment for clandestine escape. His tow-colored hair reached to his shoulders and was tied back efficiently with narrow black ribbon. In another man the look would be effeminate; in Raphael, it suggested he came from a vanished century—the eighteenth, perhaps—and could kill with a rapier’s touch.

It was unclear where he lived. When the others who worked for him arrived each morning, he was already there; when they left, he remained behind to close the vault. It was rumored that he drove an antique green Lotus of a model not seen since Steve McQueen’s salad days; but the assertion had never been proved. Some members of OTS argued that the picture of Raphael doing anything other than flying under his own wing power was completely absurd.

He had been born in North Dakota thirty-six years before and named Pete Petersen. At the time of his hiring by Andrew Nunez, the OTS chief, he was on his way to prison. What fell in between—the transformation of a North Dakota boy to a Prince of Darkness—only Raphael and Nunez understood. He never spoke of the past to anyone. He knew deception for what it was: the highest form of survival.

Nunez was on the verge of retirement when he discovered Raphael in the Metro section of the Sunday
New York Times
. A young man of extraordinary beauty, photographed in handcuffs in the midst of a Princeton University lecture hall. The previous year, Pete Petersen had decided he was tired of his inconsequential life and had set about creating a new one. At the age of twenty-eight, he had crafted what clandestine operatives would call a legend: a fully fleshed-out alternative existence, complete with an assumed name and birth certificate, which suggested he was eighteen years old.

He had called himself Raphael Alighieri, after two heroes of the Renaissance; described himself as home-schooled in Switzerland by a philosophy professor from Rome and his sculptress wife, both long dead; and given himself an orphaned adolescence wandering the world. He submitted a portfolio of charcoal sketches and a set of test scores well above the Princeton mean. Princeton admired the artistry, approved his SATs, and offered financial aid to the impoverished boy with no visible means of support.

It was only when a former acquaintance from Bismarck spotted him at a football game that the imposture was exposed.

He was charged with theft by deception and sentenced to a year’s penal servitude.

In Nunez’s eyes, as he scanned the
Times
article, Raphael had just written a near-perfect application for the CIA.

During forty years of service, Andy Nunez had made OTS what it was: the premier technical innovator of Agency Ops, the heart of forgery and deceit, green room to the Greatest Show on Earth. When he joined the CIA in the early sixties, the Office of Technical Services did not exist. It was called something else and it employed a coterie of accomplished artists and draftsmen, many of whom regarded themselves as unionized labor working in the equivalent of the government printing office. What they carved, etched, engraved, and printed was criminal when viewed from the perspective of their adversaries: foreign currency, foreign passports, foreign birth certificates, and letters of recommendation, not to mention the myriad entry and exit visas from places technically immured behind the Iron Curtain.

Andy Nunez began his career by learning how to open mail without leaving a trace. How to detect and replicate the pitfalls and deliberate traps embedded in visa stamps from mainland China. How to mix foreign inks and reweave paper fibers to ward off the bloodhounds of forgery. Nunez progressed to working exfiltration from Beijing to Hong Kong, to managing defectors and disinformation during the Vietnam War. He replicated Vietcong diaries filled with false intelligence and made sure they found their damaging way back home—although he knew not a word or character of Vietnamese. He flew in more prop planes to more airstrips in the heart of the jungle than any man should be able to survive. He was best known, however, for the creation of elaborate disguises culled from the techniques of Hollywood special effects, whose innovators he befriended and admired.

Under Nunez’s direction, Raphael Alighieri came into a kingdom. The old man passed on every secret and skill he possessed to the young Prince of Darkness. When he retired, it was with the knowledge that OTS was in the hands of the angels.

Raphael was waiting for Cuddy when he reappeared exactly twenty-five minutes later in the OTS conference room. He had a narrow black laptop open on the shining surface of the table.

“This is a very close hold,” Cuddy cautioned, and handed him a DVD.

Raphael slid the disc into his laptop without comment.

The footage was brief: perhaps thirty-five seconds of Sophie Payne’s last public appearance. She stood on the podium in Berlin’s Pariser Platz in front of the new American embassy while the Brandenburg Gate exploded.

The screen flickered, went blank, and then resumed with a shot of a stretcher being raised into the belly of a medical chopper.

“Is that Payne on the gurney?” Raphael asked with a quickening of interest.

“Forget the gurney. Look at the man on the inside, working the winch.”

Raphael’s eyes narrowed. Then he sat back in his swivel chair, a pen delicately tapping his elegant lip. “Eric Carmichael. I worked with him only once. Disciplined and not unintelligent. He’s supposed to be dead.”

“That’s the problem.”

The Prince of Darkness sighed and closed his eyes. The air of the conference room was suddenly charged with an energy that was almost sexual. “Tell me.”

“Scottie put Eric under deep cover with 30 April two and a half years ago. When Payne came back in a coffin, Scottie burned him. Eric’s under arrest in Berlin and his wife’s just been fired.”

“How thorough.” The voice was acid. “Federal police, or local?”

“BKA.”

Cuddy had learned a good deal about Raphael during several tense seconds the previous year, when they’d crouched together in a pit behind a roll of barbed wire waiting for a terrorist asset to cross through the teeth of an Israeli border patrol. The guy had been shot in the back by his own people before he reached the ditch, and it was Raphael who wormed through the barbed wire and hauled the bleeding man to safety. The next three hours were ones of screaming tension and near death, an exquisite shell game that had not succeeded in saving the asset’s life. He was a child of Hamas, nineteen years old, and he’d died in the trunk of an embassy car.

Scottie Sorensen blamed Raphael. It was Raphael who’d planned the botched exfiltration and provided the necessary documents and facial camouflage. Scottie had accused Raphael of selling secrets to the enemy for favors that were probably homosexual. Raphael had submitted to polygraphs, hour after hourin various outbuildings in Virginia. Whatever was concluded about the nature of his libido was irrelevant; he had sold nothing to anybody. The dead agent had been blown within Hamas for the previous two months; the organization had merely been waiting for the perfect moment to kill him.

“Scottie just stopped by and rifled my drawers,” Raphael told Cuddy casually. “About an hour before you showed up. I let one of the Girls deal with him.”

The Girls were Betty and Alice, fifty-something women who’d trained under Andy Nunez and whose deceptive skills were prized above rubies. Raphael loathed Scottie and refused to perform the slightest miracle on his behalf.

He lifted a set of earphones to his head and murmured into a microphone.

“Yo,” said a disembodied voice.

“Betty, sweet, what did the Prick want this afternoon?”

“Cover docs for an op in Berlin.”

“His own?”

“A woman’s. She’s traveling NOC.”

NOC: nonofficial cover, unaffiliated with government. The woman would be posing as an academic, then, or a businesswoman.

“Think he’s flying in his latest lay?” Raphael asked.

The voice snorted. “Not by the look of her picture.”

“Was it on file?”

“He brought it with him.”

“A private contractor, then. How
delicious
. I’d like a list,” Raphael said abruptly, “of everything he took. Also the woman’s photograph. The Prick has no idea you’re here?” he demanded of Cuddy.

“None. He sent me home to pack.”

“You’ve been fired, too?”

Cuddy shook his head. “I’m on my way to Berlin. Eleven-thirty tonight. Scottie and I are supposed to explain the truth to Eric.”

“The Prick said nothing about this woman?”

“Nothing at all. She could be a polygrapher.”

“I would be astonished if she were. Thanks, Betts.”

He shoved the headset down around his neck and stared into the middle distance for a few seconds. “Eric.
Berlin.
You want me to pull a Houdini? Get him out of the chains and the locked box before he drowns?”

“Better than that.” Cuddy’s voice dropped, as though Betty or Alice might still be listening. “I want you to end his life for good this time.”

There was an instant’s silence. Then the Prince of Darkness stretched and flexed his fingers, a cat unsheathing claws. “Only if I can screw Scottie in the process,” he bargained softly.

“Why bother, otherwise?”

Raphael smiled. “Go home and pack, Cuddy. I’ll be at Dulles to kiss you good-bye.”