The Disposable Man (7 page)

The patrolman slowly lowered his gun, his disappointment complete. “Shit.”

· · ·

The DC police were sympathetic and helpful, giving me aspirin and an ice pack for my neck. They listened patiently to my account, took a few notes, and when they were done, they even drove me to my Arlington motel. But I wasn’t asked to look through any mug books, or to give a detailed description to an artist, and when the switchblade was recovered, I noticed no effort being made to preserve any fingerprints. What I’d suffered, I was told, was a typical attempted mugging—one of the mandatory accessories of any large city. I was wished a pleasant visit, given a generalized apology for having witnessed the back end of the welcome wagon, and left to my own devices.

That night, however, as I lay watching the passing car lights play across my ceiling, I found myself unable to be as casually dismissive. While not a city dweller, I still knew the makeup of the average mugger. The man I’d wrestled with had not been such a creature. I’d sensed duplicity and purpose in his eyes, beyond the presence of any cash in my wallet.

As the hours slipped by, the more I replayed what had happened, the more I believed our meeting to have been no simple random act.

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.”