Sweepers (28 page)

Train nodded. This was a game he recognized.

in probably doing the wrong thing here,” Carpenter said equably. “But it seems to me that Sherman deserves one chance, especially if he’s innocent.”

Carpenter got up walked back around to his desk. He picked up some papers and pretended to study them for a moment before continuing. “By the way, Karen had an archive request in to review the investigation records on the incident in Vietnam,” he said. “I’ve had her request intercepted. That investigation report is highly classified. But from what I saw, Sherman did the right thing in that incident.”

Train had been about to ask. He was glad the admiral had brought it up first. “Galantz may not think so,” he said.

Carpenter looked over at him. “You know that. I know that. That’s why I want you to keep an eye on Karen Lawrence. I have my reasons for having her on this case, but I don’t want her hurt.”

“I understand, Admiral,”

Train said, although he wasn’t sure he did.

“Good,” Carpenter said. “Remember, time is of the essence, especially for Admiral Sherman. That’s all.”

When the door closed, Carpenter sat back in his chair and thought for a moment, then punched the intercom.

“Get me a secure call into Admiral Kensington’s office,” he said. He punched off and waited. Kensington came on the line.

“Admiral Kdnsington.”

“Good morning, Admiral,” Carpenter said. “Further to our last conversation on the Sherman matter, I have a suggestion to make.”

There was a moment of silence. “Is this thing under control, Tom?”

Carpenter thought about the DNI’s little bombshell. “I think so, Admiral,” he said slowly. I

“Because if it isn’t, we need to do something. We’ve had i enough dirty laundry hanging out there lately.

I’m not sure any of us could stand this thing getting loose.”

“I understand. I think we need to take Sherman out of circulation for a few days.”

“I’m all ears.”

Train left the JAG’s office, shaking his head as he walked back to his own cubicle on the fourth floor. Neatly done, Admiral, he thought. You want me to beat the bushes, but you can always say that I was never tasked to find this guy.

If there was to be any trouble, Mrs. von Rensel’s bouncing baby boy, Train, had, in fact, been told to stay away from Galantz.

He reached his cubicle, checked his voice mail, and then called Karen to back-brief her on his meeting with Carpenter. “He wanted an update, soup to nuts, on the whole case.

I gave it to him.”

“You told him about last night?”

“Yup. That upset him. I also got the impression the bigs are stirring.”

“What did he say about that archived file?”

“That he blocked it. That it contains highly classified material. That it shows Sherman did the right thing back there, whfttever that means.

But we’re not going to see that report.

She was silent for a moment. “Any new instructions?” she asked.

It was Train’s turn to hesitate. He did not want to tell her what his tasking had been. She was nervous enough already.

“Not exactly,” he said. “The gist of it was to confirm that I’m to help you in your inquiries. So right now, I’m going to put on my NIS hat and enter some federal databases.”

“So you agree we should concentrate on the son first and not Galantz?”

There was a thread of concern in her voice.

“Galantz is complicated,” Train said. “Let me explain that when we’re not on an unsecured phone. There definitely might be other players in this game, though.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. Hold that thought. Right now, see what you can get from Sherman on Little Boy Blue. If I can get a read on where the son is, maybe we’ll go see him this afternoon. If you’re up to it, that is.”, in up to that.”

“Okay. I’ll get back to you.”

He hung up and sat back in his chair. You really need to talk to Mchale Johnson, von Rensel. He sighed and got out his personal phone book, looked up a number, and then placed a call. Johnson wasn’t in, an anonymous voice said, so he left a call-back message and mentioned the word SEAL. Then he called the NIS database query center over in the Washington Navy Yard, identified himself, and asked them to call him back at the JAG IR division’s secure number. The database administrator got back to him in five minutes and he gave him the name and the few general match points he had regarding Jack Sherman’s military service, approximate age, and a last-known location in the vicimty of Quantico, Virginia. He told them he would have better-defined data and a Social Security number later in the day. He asked for searches within the military and FBI criminal identification and information systems, since Sherman had said the kid had been thrown out of the Marines. He put a priority label on his request and asked for a voice debrief, with a final report to be transmitted electronically into his PC address within the JAG local-area computer network as soon as possible..’ You say you’ll have better definition data this afternoon?” the administrator asked.

Train’s heart sank. Should never have said that.

“Yeah.”

“Then come back in with that data. Then we’ll do the coarse screen, Mr.

Train agreed and hung up. He sighed. He had hoped for a quick look, but the database people weren’t about to do something twice. He then decided to try one of the most sophisticated search tools available-namely, the telephone company’s information operator.

“Northern Virginia information, what city?”

“Woodbfidge, Quantico, Virginia.”

“Go ahead.”

“John Lee Sherman. Address unknown. Might be Triangle, or Dumfries, or just Stafford County.”

“One moment please.”

He waited. About half the time he went looking for someone, the guy was in the damned phone book.

“I have a John L. Sherman.”

“Let’s try that.”

“Hold for the number.”

Bingo, he thought, as he recorded the number. Then he called the database administrator back and luckily got a new voi e. He went through the identification drill again, but this time he gave him the telephone number, asking for an address trace. The database guys could do this on a local PC.

He was put on hold for a minute.

“Your boy’s phone is in the Cherry Hill area, right north of the base at Quantico. The billing address is a Triangle post office box, though. I can get a premises wiring locator from C&P, but it’ll take a day, and you’ll have to come in with a for-rnal coarse screen request. But that phone’s in Cherry Hill. “

“Much grass,” Train replied, and hung up. Do it like the pros, he thought. When in doubt, call goddamn Information.

He decided to check his voice mail again. One call. “For Dr. von Rensel from Dr. Johnson,” the man said. “Lunch at the New Orleans House in Rosslyn, eleven-fifteen. Today.

Dr. Johnson is really glad Mr. von Rensel called.”

Train blinked and looked at his watch. It was 10:45. He just had time to hop the Metro over to Rosslyn. He called Karen, but now there was no answer. He hung up, frowning.

Now where the hell did she go? And she did take the dog, I hope to hell.

Mchale Johnson was a very tall, almost cadaverous-looking man. He had a long, narrow, and very white face with, a prominent forehead, highly arched eyebrows, and a long, bony nose. He wore square-rimmed glasses, which magnified his pale gray eyes. His hair was lanky, disheveled, and going gray, like’the rest of him. He did not get up when Train approached the table, but continued to look around the room as if he was trying to remember something or someone. Train pulled out a chair, tested it for strength, and then replaced it with one from the adjacent table. The two women sitting at that table just looked at each other, declining protest.

“Dr. Johnson, I presume,” Train said. He was pretty sure that Mchale was indeed the man’s first name, but he doubted the Johnson part.

“Dr. von Rensel,” Johnson replied, tilting his head back to examine Train through those huge glasses. “You’ve gotten bigger. That’s almost hard to imagine.”

“Just spreading, probably,” Train replied, looking at the menu. The doctor business was a private joke between them.

Johnson held a doctorate in cybernetics, and he insisted on calling Train Doctor because of his law degree. And probably because it amused him to do so. Train put down his menu.

“Your secretary intimated that my phone call was, um, timely.”

Johnson nodded slowly. “My secretary. I’ll have to tell him that. But considering the subject, it was indeed timely.”

“Indeed. Here’s the waitress.” They both placed their orders, having to speak up to be heard in the general hubbub. When the waitress left, Train asked if this was an appropriate place to talk. Johnson shrugged.

“It’s crowded and noisy. Tough place to eavesdrop, really. Did someone tell you to call me?”

Train shook his head. “No. I’ve been given some politically adroit tasking, so I decided to pull a string or two on my own. I was hoping you might be able to enlighten me with respect to a certain Marcus Galantz, ex-hospital corpsman, USN, ex-SEAL, and current MIA.”

Johnson nodded slowly again, still looking slightly bugeyed through those windowpane-sized glasses. “Never heard of him,” he said finally, giving Train a friendly stare.

Train smiled and looked away for a moment. He could not imagine Johnson being an operational agent himself, but he could very well imagine him as a controller. “Let me rephrase that,” he replied. “Would you perhaps like to tell me a story?”

“Ah, yes, that I would,” Johnson said immediately, then paused as the waitress whizzed by to drop off Train’s beer and Johnson’s iced tea.

When she had gone, Johnson sipped some tea.

“Once upon a time, in a faraway place,” he began, “a certain organization had a need to recruit people with certain talents. There was concurrently a fair-sized military action in progress, and this organization was tangentially involved in certain peripheral, perhaps narcotics-related operations, which operations said organization would just as soon forget about. After a while, the organization in question discovered that occasionally certain persons would become available for recruitment, sometimes through rather unconventional circumstances.”

“As in Americans who might have ended up in Saigon jails under questionable, perhaps even embarrassing circumstances. “

“That was one way, yes. There were conditions, of course, to such recruitment.”

“One being that old identities disappeared and new ones were created. “

“Or that there be no identity at all, you see,” Johnson said. “That could be even more useful, depending on what the individual was being recruited to do. Or become.”

Train sampled his beer. “Were the people who might have been recruited in this fashion being considered for particularly dangerous work?” he asked.

Johnson pursed his lips as he thought about the question.

“More often, they were being recruited to place other individuals in danger, rather than themselves. Remember, the operations in question may have involved the heroin business. Disputes in that business tend even to this day to invoke fairly rigorous sanctions from time to time.”

“I love it when you talk double. What was that lovely expression back in the sixties? Terminate with extreme prejudice?”

“Something like that. Or so I’m told. This may all be apocryphal.

The waitress appeared again with their lunch. Johnson waited until she was gone before resuming his little homily.

The place was noisy enough now that they both had to lean in across the table even to hear each other.

“That’s an interesting concept,” Train said around a bite of his BLT.

“But if you recruit and train a guy like that and then employ him in that or in related lines of work, how do you keep control of him? In the event that he gets out of control, I mean. Especially if he doesn’t exist in the first place? And given that the United States government has publicly and frequently disavowed the use of such individuals? I mean, what if he goes freelancing: What sanctions do you use on him?”

Johnson looked up and mimed clapping his hands in silent applause. “Very good, Doctor,” he said. Then he addressed his soup for a moment. “That, of course, is the heart of the operational problem with the individuals I’ve been describing,” he continued. “What the Roman emperor was always wanting to know: Who guards the guards?” Then he paused, staring at Train, a spoonful of soup in midair. The light from the main chandelier reflected off his glasses, obscuring his eyes. “That particular control problem requires a very special individual indeed. And that requirement has some relevance to your initial question, if you follow.”

Train sat back in his chair, a chill washing over him. So Qalantz wasn’t just a wet-work mechanic. He was a sweeper, a very special operative whose job it was to go after a mechanic who was no longer under effective operational control.

“Oh,” he said.

“Yes, indeed, oh,” Johnson replied.

And then the full import hit him-why Johnson of the FBI had agreed to meet with him on an hour’s notice. There must be a serious flap on within the operational arms of the intelligence community, serious enough for the FBI to have gotten wind of it. If Galantz was indeed behind two murders out in the civilian community, then his employers had a genuine crisis on their hands. It was one thing for an agency hit man to jump the traces; it was quite another if a sweeper did it. He thought momentarily of Karen and the whispering voice.

He looked back up at Johnson, who was watching him work it out. Johnson arched his eyebrows, nodded at him meaningfully, and then went back to his soup. Train had suddenly lost his appetite.

“I’m a little confused about one thing,” Train said finally.

“Only one thing. How felicitous for you.”

Train ignored that. “I should think,” he said, “that warnings would have been passed along by now, from their graybeards to our graybeards. As in, ‘butt out.’ “

“Quite so. Although your own personal graybeards at MS aren’t involved.

This is well above NIS’s pay grade.”

“I’m not at NIS. I’m on loan.”