The Last Spymaster (17 page)

As Litchfield tapped in his door code, Bobbye Johnson, the DCI, appeared in the corridor, walking toward him, a worried expression on her face. She was in her shirtsleeves and dark gray suit pants, her auburn mane of hair rumpled. The hollows on her broad face were deep, showing weariness.

He assumed a pleasant smile. “Hello, Bobbye. I thought you would’ve gone home by now.”

“Too much going on. You just get in?” Her voice had the moderate tones of the well-bred, well-educated Midwesterner. Her father had been Robert (“Red”) Sunday, a tough OSS operative who had served in the Burma theater during World War II. She had inherited his brains and courage but not his good luck. The political situation was stacked against her. She had a gift for ignoring it.

“Traffic was bumper-to-bumper,” he told her. “You know how it is. Want to come in?” He opened his office door and turned on the light.

“Not tonight. I’m going to fill you in and leave.” Still, she glanced inside. “Whenever I see it, I have to remind myself it’s your office now—not Jay’s.”

He leaned against the doorframe, hiding his annoyance that he had to waste time with her. “If things ever slow down, I’ll make some radical changes. You’ll see.” He surveyed the desk, once Tice’s, and the tall-backed chair, also once Tice’s. All of the furniture had been Tice’s—side chairs, tables, lamps, credenza, and the easy chairs grouped around the coffee table near the windows. Tice had put his books into storage, but the massive shelves remained. Litchfield had remembered the titles and replaced those he wanted while adding others more to his taste. He enjoyed working in Tice’s sandbox, coloring it with his scent. He would never change anything more.

Johnson was looking at him. “All of Whippet’s files, secure computers, and papers are in-house now. I’ve ordered a search for anything that would hint at who hit Whippet and why. Did Hannah ever mention she was concerned that one of their operations had generated particularly bad heat?” She offered no apology for stepping onto his management turf. She did this sometimes, shifting gears to when she had been an operative and hands-on spymaster herself.

“Not a word. Have you discounted my theory that Tice did it?”

“I’m interested in the truth, whatever it is.”

“Of course.” He was unworried the probe would reveal Hannah’s attempts to eliminate Tice—she would never have committed that to paper or e-mail.

“We took over forensics inside Whippet house,” Bobbye continued.

“The police are working the exterior and grounds. We found no unknown fingerprints. No hair, no billfolds, no matchbooks conveniently publicizing some bar or motel. Too bad real life isn’t a TV show where the perfect clue is left behind. We have hundreds of samples from the bloodbath. Everything’s being checked. I’ve sent our bodies out to canvass the neighborhood for witnesses. So far all they’ve got is that one shot was heard. People
thought the noise was a car backfiring. A grandma in her sixties was visiting down the block, and she saw a man leave—older, wearing a cap. He was fast. According to the timing, he must’ve exited after the massacre.”

“Older? He was fast? That’s it?”

“She said it was too dark to see more. What caught her attention was that he looked as if he were her age, but he moved as if he were considerably younger.”

“Tice! He might’ve gone back for a final check. He wouldn’t worry about any corpses calling the police on him.”

She nodded. “If Cunningham hadn’t reported the attack, we might not have known about it for hours. Okay, I’ve got to get back to work. I’ve had three calls from the Oval Office just since nine o’clock. We’ll be answering a lot of questions in the morning. The joint intelligence committee will have the knives out for us.”

Litchfield noted the “us.” “We’ll get it under control, Bobbye.”

She started to leave, arms crossed, head bent in thought. She turned. “Have you heard anything at all about Moses, whether he’s working again?”

“Not since you asked the last time—six months ago now?” When she shrugged, he continued. “The way I see it, his heyday’s long over. He’s retired or dead. Most of the new people don’t even seem to know he existed. Why?”

“This nasty business with Jay Tice reminds me of him. I don’t like it when major figures from our world disappear without even a rumor about what’s happened to them or where they are. Jay’s case is similar, except he’s reappeared—and we don’t know for sure how or why.” Shaking her head worriedly, she marched back toward her office.

Silver Spring, Maryland

Amid the dense shadows of her living room, surrounded by the pungent odor of the burning cigar, Elaine stared at Jay Tice in the moonlight. His dowdy cap was gone, and so was his old-man’s slouch. He stood apparently relaxed, but his knees were flexed and his feet were at shoulder width for maximum balance, ready to sprint or attack. As he let the slats of the blinds close, his words hammered her brain:
My friends call me Jay.
His warmth and charm were poisoned honey. He was already trying to manipulate her, while his gun never wavered from its aim at her heart.

“Hello, Jay.” She stood up slowly, planning her words, keeping herself calm. He was a dozen feet away. “I’m glad to meet you at last. What can I say to convince you to return to Allenwood?” She glanced down at her gun, still pointed back at the chair. The angle to swing it toward him was wide, at least ninety degrees—

There was a swift movement of air, and her Walther disappeared, leaving her fingers stinging. Her heart hammered as the muzzle of his Browning cut into her belly and he towered in front of her so close she could smell the scent of old blood on him. Her own gun dangled from his other hand. His entire body radiated danger. She was looking up at the real Jay Tice, a full head taller than she. At his strong features and lined face and piercing eyes. The impact was of power and some deep percolating rage that was capable of crushing anyone or anything in his path.

Then the threat evaporated in a smile. “My returning to Allenwood isn’t going to happen. At least not yet.” His tone was inviting, collegial, giving the sense of someone who appreciated the other’s presence. The way he inclined his large head and looked at her had an aura of Continental, cufflinked suavity, while his disarming frankness painted him as utterly honest. He was a chameleon.

And he was gone—across the room, silent and swift, this time to the
front window, where he kept glancing at the street through the blind while keeping the Browning trained on her.

Act relaxed. Don’t fuel his sense of control.
“Not yet?” she said. “That gives me hope. Glad you made yourself a drink. I could use one myself.”
Keep talking. Keep him talking.
“What’s on your mind?” She went to her liquor cabinet. The aim of his pistol followed smoothly.

As she opened the cabinet, a small interior light shone, illuminating glasses and bottles and flowing out in a dusky arc that showed the figure in the armchair was a dummy like the one in Tice’s prison cell. Wearing her jeans and shirt, it was stuffed with crushed newspapers, too, the edges showing from the sleeves. On top was her bulbous glass vase, the size of an adult’s head, turned upside down. Black electrician’s tape held a SIG Sauer to the chair’s arm, aimed at the door. On the table beside the smoldering cigar lay a miniature recorder-player. That explained the voice when she came in the door. He must have prerecorded “Don’t turn on the light” and used a remote to activate the order. But what showed the supremacy of his tradecraft was the cigar. Its glowing orange coal drew the eye and subtly guaranteed that the shadowy figure was a living, breathing person.

“Why did Whippet want to wipe me?” He enunciated each word slowly, clearly.

She opened a bottle of Ketel One vodka. “I don’t know that they did.”

“They tried at least once. Maybe twice. The second time I recognized two of the operatives when they came after a friend and me at his place. They were Whippet, and it was obviously a wet assignment.”

“Your friend was Palmer Westwood?”

He nodded. “How did you know?”

Suddenly the Langley-issued cell phone in her shoulder bag rang.
Laurence Litchfield.
Its sound was distinctive from her personal cell. She stared longingly at the bag. It rang again.

“Your cell?” Tice asked.

When she nodded, he took three steps and picked up the bag and fished out the cell, never taking his gaze from her. He laid the cell on the floor. Then he rose up. As it rang again, he slammed his heel down with a violent
motion. The ringing ceased. The plastic shattered in a loud cracking noise. She inhaled sharply. He dropped the remains into her purse.

She moistened her dry lips and said nothing, but all she could think about was escape. She had to get away and alert Litchfield. Tice must be stopped.

He returned to the window. “You were going to tell me how you knew I was with Palmer.”

Her hands trembled. She moved them into the shadow to pour two fingers of vodka. “It was a guess. He was your mentor at one time, and you were close. It made sense you’d go to him.” She drank the liquor. It burned from her throat to her belly, but she felt marginally better.

“Whippet must’ve thought so, too. They tried to wipe us.” He described an armed man in the swamp who had tried to shoot him, then the arrival of more than a dozen who chased them to the river, where they barely escaped in Westwood’s plane. That was when he had recognized the two operatives.

Cunningham was silent. Hannah had said Whippet arrived after the attack. Either Hannah or Tice was lying. Considering everything, more likely both were. “I have no reason to believe you. If Langley wanted a traitor dead, they could handle it quietly in Allenwood. A common prison shanking over some minor dispute. Happens often enough no one would question it.”

“True. That’s one of the reasons I’m certain my escape has triggered something. Or it’s interfering with someone’s plans. What happened at Whippet? Who hit them?”

Her head jerked up. “You did.
You
arranged it!”

“Why would I? No, no, Elaine. I had no reason to hit Whippet.”

“Yes, you did! You just admitted you knew they were after you. You did them first, before they could do you!”

“I didn’t want butchery. I wanted information.”

She remembered hearing Whippet’s front door close. “If you know they were hit, then it
was
you inside. You went in because you knew it was safe—everyone was dead.”

He shrugged. “I went in carefully. I had to confirm the two men I saw in North Carolina were still with Whippet. They were. I found them—as you said, dead.”

“What if the police had arrived?”

“Their sirens would’ve given me plenty of warning. Whippet was my best hope. My one link to find out what’s going on. It was worth the risk.”

She thought about that—and about how quickly he had taken the gun from her, how quickly he had moved off to the window. Quickly, silently, almost invisibly. And she had not heard him inside Whippet house, either—until he left.

“I’d been hiding across the street for ten minutes or so,” he explained, his tones persuasive. “I wanted to isolate one of the operatives and get some answers. But when the front door opened, a dozen men slipped out. At first I thought they were part of the unit. But the porch light was off, they moved fast and together, and I saw dark blotches on their hands. Even in the moonlight, it looked like blood. Plus most had that wild look one learns to recognize—crude, like punch-drunk fighters who want to beat the hell out of someone. When I see that, I know something bad’s gone down.”

The words escaped her lips: “You were right. It was a slaughter.”

“They’d left the door ajar, which told me they wanted their work discovered—probably to make sure the message got wherever it was intended to go as fast as possible. I didn’t find anyone alive.” He sighed. “It reminded me of La Belle Discotheque when it was bombed. You’re probably too young to remember. It was 1986, West Berlin. Our soldiers used to hang out there, which was why Libyan terrorists targeted it. A couple of people died, and more than two hundred were injured, many badly. Both places had the same sense of devastation.”

“You’ve left out a key element—me. I was alive. And I heard you leave. You can’t tell me you didn’t see or hear me, because you’re better at this than I am.”

His voice dropped ten degrees. “I saw you.” From across the room, his gun homed in on her heart. “I repeat, someone’s worried enough to send
Whippet to terminate me. And you’re Whippet. The only reason I can see to let you live is if you tell me what in hell is going on!”

From the passenger seat of the midnight-blue BMW 530i, Jerry Angelides surveyed the narrow street in Silver Spring. It rose like a concrete snake, gray and shifty. The moonlight was bright, the air still warm. That would not last. The night was going to turn cold; Angelides knew it. Trees and cars and lit windows rimmed the street, announcing boring suburbia behind the dark bricks of town houses. They were built in pairs so they could share a wall. In between were pencil-thin side yards.

Angelides was a connoisseur of environments. You had to know about them. More specifically, you had to know how to get in—and out. As he peered around, he had one of his bad feelings. It was like an itch. Something was going to happen.

As the BMW’s tires thrummed along the pavement, he told his driver, “That’s it, Rink. That’s Cunningham’s place. Stop here then go find someplace to park. Make it legal. Don’t want any cops.”