The Last Spymaster (2 page)

“Experience. Keep walking.” Tice tightened the handcuff. “Get rid of the weapon, or you’ll never see Damascus again.”

For the first time, doubt flickered in the young man’s face.

“Drop it, son,” Tice said. “You’d be insane not to want to go home, and this is the only chance you’ll get. Drop it.”

The fire that had burned so feverishly in al-Hadi’s eyes died. His fingers opened, and a razored metal file fell silently into the snow, a weapon of close assassination. Al-Hadi peered away, but not before Tice saw his humiliation. He had failed.

Then al-Hadi’s lips thinned. He seemed to gather himself. “Release me!” he ordered.

Tice considered then reached over and unlocked the handcuff.

Al-Hadi gave no acknowledgment. Instead, he lifted his chin defiantly. Neither spoke as they closed in on the bridge’s center. A gust of bitter wind needled Tice’s face. Following protocol, he stopped a yard from the four-inch-wide white line that marked the border between West and East. But his prisoner bolted toward it.

“Halt!” Tice made a show of grabbing for his arm.

“La’a!”
Without a glance at Dr. Abendroth, al-Hadi hurtled past.

As clouds of brittle snow exploded from the youth’s heels, Tice focused on Raina Manhardt. A half-head taller than the diminutive doctor, she wore a fur hat and a stern expression.

“I wish I could say it was a pleasure.” He spoke in German.

The Stasi officer’s eyes flashed. She responded in English with a perfect American accent: “So we meet again, Comrade Tice.” She spun on her boot heel and followed her charge.

Tice stared after her a few seconds then greeted Dr. Abendroth. “It’s an honor, sir.”

“Spaseeba!”
Abendroth was excited. He took two large steps into the West and pumped Tice’s hand. “My knees ache, or I would fall down and kiss this old bridge.”

They turned in unison and strode off. The cold seemed to settle into Tice’s bones. He inhaled a deep breath.

“You were worried?” Dr. Abendroth asked curiously. He had the wrinkled skin of a seventy-year-old, although he was only in his forties.

“Of course. And you?”

“I gave that up long ago.” The dissident’s smile deepened. “I prefer to think of pleasant things.”

The return trip seemed longer to Tice. Ahead, the dawn rose slowly, almost reluctantly, above the bleak hills. The waiting party of armed Americans resembled a still life from some military album. Only Palmer Westwood seemed real. In his camel-hair overcoat, he stalked back and forth, furiously smoking a cigarette.

As soon as they stepped onto land, Tice introduced the two men.

The small, shabby pediatrician took the hand of the tall, genteel CIA official. “You came just to welcome me, Mr. Westwood? You are so civilized. I have shaken no one’s hand in friendship in years, other than another prisoner’s. And now I have done it twice within minutes.” He gestured toward the stately Mercedes, where the driver stood at the open rear door, waiting. “My chariot?”

Tice gazed at it. “Yes.”

With a crisp nod, Dr. Abendroth marched off alone, his head turning as if he were memorizing the world. While Palmer Westwood followed, Tice paused and glanced over his shoulder. On the other end of the bridge, Raina Manhardt and al-Hadi were approaching their Zil limousine.

When Tice looked back, Westwood had stopped to grind out his cigarette beneath the toe of his wing tip. Tice shifted his focus to Abendroth, monitoring his approach to the open door of the sedan. It was time. Taking a small step backward, Tice squared his shoulders and gave an almost imperceptible nod.

The percussive noise of a single rifle shot splintered the quiet. Blood and bone fragments exploded into the air, and Pavel Abendroth pitched forward,
the back of his skull shattered by the bullet. His right arm bounced off the doorframe and landed hard inside the sedan.

For an instant, the escort of American soldiers froze, their faces stunned. Then their rifles slashed up and moved violently, searching for a target. At the same time, Raina Manhardt shoved a grinning Faisal al-Hadi into the limo and dove in after him.

Tice ran to Abendroth, bellowing at his people to alert headquarters and find the sniper. With the stench of hot blood filling his nostrils, Tice crouched. The pediatrician lay crumpled on a patch of dirty snow. Tice picked up the hand that had fallen inside the car. Thick calluses and ragged scars covered the palm, showing the brutal labor and torture Abendroth had endured.

Tice found a faint pulse in the frail wrist, growing weaker. When it stopped, he closed the dead man’s staring eyes and lifted his head to watch across the length of Glienicke Bridge. Tires spinning on the snow, the Communist limo shot off toward East Berlin.

I grew accustomed to walking on a knife’s edge and could imagine no other life.

—SOVIET GENERAL DMITRI
POLYAKOV
For eighteen years, he was a U.S.
mole code-named Tophat, until
Soviet mole Robert Hanssen
betrayed him.

April 2005
Chaux de Mont, Switzerland

All days should be like this. All moments. Gerhard Shoutens hurtled down an expert ski run that paralleled a razorback ridge, following his friend Kristoph Maas. Sunlight drenched the snow-mantled Alps, and the wide sky was a vault of sapphire blue.

Gerhard reveled in the soaring exhilaration of speeding through the crisp new powder.
“Das ist Wahnsinn!”
he shouted into the wind.

Kristoph whooped in agreement.
“Super! Toll!”

They flashed through a hushed stand of pines and into an open area, their velocity increasing, their skis hissing as the trail took them along the winding rim of a couloir. On one side spread a slope of pristine snow. Gerhard glanced down the other—a spectacular gorge so deep that house-size boulders at the bottom appeared to be mere pebbles. It was breathtaking.

“Sieh dir das mal an!”
he yelled.

But before his friend could admire the view, his entire body seemed to recoil as if he had struck some obstacle hidden in the snow. He gave an outraged bellow, his skis lifted off the track, and he was airborne. Gerhard leaned low into his skis, frantically trying to reach him. But Kristoph shot off the edge and into the void.

Two days later
Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex
Allenwood, Pennsylvania

At 6:40
A.M.
, ten minutes past morning call at the crowded federal penitentiary in the Susquehanna Valley, a stranger in civilian clothes marched down a gray cellblock, staring straight ahead. A Bureau of Prisons lieutenant led; two guards followed. All looked uneasy.

The man paused at a cell. As soon as the door opened, he moved inside
and glared down at the solitary cot. The blanket had been yanked aside to reveal blue prison trousers and shirt stuffed with crumpled newspapers and arranged to mimic a man lying on his side. There was also a fake wood arm covered with flesh-colored upholstery from the prison factory. With the pillow pounded high as if it covered a head, and the blanket on top exposing part of the arm, not even the obligatory flash of a guard’s light during nighttime checks would reveal that no one slept there.

“Clever bastard.” The stranger jerked a cell phone from his pocket. He punched in a number and kept his voice low: “He’s gone, all right. I’m in his cell now. I’ll—”

“Seal it off,” the voice on the other end of the line ordered. “No one’s to search it, understand? And for God’s sake, make sure no one tells the press that Jay Tice has escaped!”

Langley, Virginia

At 9:06
A.M.
Laurence Litchfield, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations—the DDO—hand-carried a sealed white envelope down from the seventh floor to the Staff Operations Center, the SOC, which was responsible for case-management support to colleagues in the field. In his mid-forties, Litchfield was lean, with a runner’s wiry body and a lanky gait. His eyes were carved deep into his face. Above them, wide brows formed an ink-black line across his forehead.

The SOC chief looked up from her desk. “Good morning, Mr. Litchfield. We got some overnight requests from our people in Yemen and Qatar. I was going to memo you about our progress with the intelligence summit, but I can fill you in now.”

“First I need to talk to one of your people—Elaine Cunningham.”

She noted the envelope in his hand. “Cunningham? You know she’s sidelined.”

“I know. Show me where she is.”

She nodded and led him out the door and down two long corridors and into a room crammed with gray modular cubicles, which someone
long ago had cynically dubbed the Parking Lot. Here a glacially changing landscape of some three dozen field officers waited like used cars collecting dust, futures uncertain. Their covers had been irrevocably blown, or they had proved inept, or they had run into Langley politics. For many, the next stop was the tedium of personnel or recruitment or curriculum—or, worst case, dismissal.

The chief pointed out Cunningham’s cubicle among the maze, and Litchfield thanked her. “Go up to my office. I’ll meet you there.”

She left, and he turned down the narrow aisle and found Elaine Cunningham in her cramped enclosure, marching back and forth beside her desk, arms crossed, her shoulder propping her phone against her ear as she talked quietly into it. She was a small woman, twenty-nine years old and blond, dressed in an unbuttoned black jacket, white T-shirt, and belted black pants.

As he leaned against the frame of her cubicle to study her, she glanced up and recognized him. She winked one large blue eye in greeting.

And continued talking into the phone: “So, your missing source is a broker in Brussels. He’s a morose Dane, unmarried, follows soccer. He didn’t show up for a blind date yesterday and missed the alternate meet this morning. Now you have word he’s in the wind, and Copenhagen can’t find him.” She pursed her lips. Her pace quickened. “All Scandinavians tend to be stereotyped as morose, but there are real national differences. It’s the Swedes who are mostly angst-ridden, while the Danes are more happy-go-lucky. So your morose Dane may actually be Swedish, and if he’s driving home, he probably didn’t stop in Copenhagen but took the Øresund Fixed Link across the sound into Malmö. When amateurs change identities, they usually create legends based on what they already know. If he’s Swedish—especially if he comes from the Malmö area—it’s possible he knows Copenhagen well enough to fake it as his hometown, and if he does, it’s a good bet he speaks Danish like a native.”

Cunningham paused, listening. “My pleasure. No, this is the end of the Langley road for me. Hey, it’s been great working with you, too. You always give me interesting questions.” As she hung up, she grabbed the single sheet
of paper in her printer tray. “Morning, Mr. Litchfield. This is my lucky day. Who would’ve thought I’d get to resign to the DDO himself. Just to make it official, here’s my letter.”

Litchfield was unsurprised. “You’ll make your psychologist happy.” He took the letter, folded it into his pocket, and sat in the only side chair.

“That’s what I’m all about—making CIA clinicians happy.” Her smile did not involve her eyes.

“I suspect you don’t really want to quit. People who excel seldom do.”

As Litchfield continued to watch, she blinked then sank into her desk chair. Dressed in her simple black and white clothes, her hair smoothed back into a ponytail at the nape of her neck, and wearing little makeup, she could pass as a cop or the leader of a gang of thieves. This flexibility of affect would be easier for her than for some, because she was neither beautiful nor ugly. Still, she was pretty enough that she could use her looks: Her face was slender, her cheekbones good, her classic features slightly irregular, and her golden hair shone. Litchfield had studied her file. Now he had seen her. So far, she was perfect.

“What you say has a certain truth to it,” she acknowledged. “But I’ve also heard it said that a rut is just like a grave—only longer. I’m in a rut. I’m not doing Langley any good, and I’m not doing myself any good. It’s time to get on with my life, such as it is.” She gazed at the white envelope in his hand then peered up at him curiously. “But I think you have something else in mind.”

He inclined his head. “I have a job tailored to your talents . . . and to your limitations. To do it, you’ll be in the field alone, which you seem to prefer anyway.”

“Not necessarily. It’s just that the bodies Langley kept sending to partner with me turned out to be less than stellar.”

“You don’t trust anyone, do you?”

“My mother. I’m fond of my mother. I trust her. Unfortunately, she lives far away, in California.”

“You trusted your husband, too. But he’s dead. Afghanistan, right?”

For a moment she appeared speechless. She seemed to shrink, grow calcified, as hard as a tombstone.

He pushed her again: “You’ve had a problem working with people since he died. Your psychologist has recommended Langley let you go.”