We went out there to Nicaragua, to Afghanistan, to Tangiers, to Colombia . . . We went out there with our hearts and minds in the right place, and we became something that we never imagined we could possibly be.
Like I said before, the journey to such a place was brief, almost unnoticed, but the return seems to last forever.
Perhaps, in that small way, I was so much like my father.
TWENTY-SIX
Eight minutes to four Lorentzen returned. He clutched a handful of papers. On his face he wore an expression of quiet determination.
‘I have moved mountains,’ he said as he sat down once more. He set the sheaf of papers on the table ahead of him, and then picked up each in turn and handed it to Miller.
‘Copy of Mr McCullough’s police department ID card, his social security card, and a copy of the address confirmation bill he used from the telephone company. I also have a copy of the original account application form he filled out.’
Miller looked through the papers, passed them in turn to Roth.
‘Mr Lorentzen, I am indebted to you,’ Miller said. ‘You really have done the most remarkable job here. The police department is grateful, very grateful indeed.’
Lorentzen was happy to have solved the problem.
Minutes later he was wishing Miller and Roth the very best in their investigation, standing at one of the front windows, watching them until they disappeared around the corner. He stayed there for a moment longer, and then he turned and went back the way he’d come.
Twenty-five minutes later, out through the worst of the late afternoon traffic, Al Roth and Robert Miller stood on the sidewalk facing a run-down tenement block on Corcoran Street. They had walked both sides of the street for a good ten minutes. Roth had checked the house numbers twice. There was no escaping it. The address that McCullough had given the Washington American Trust, the address that had been confirmed by an AT&T billing, was nothing more than a derelict building, seemingly unoccupied for years.
Miller stood there for some time, hands buried in his pockets, his expression a combination of disbelief and resignation. An unstoppable sense of inevitability now seemed to pervade everything to do with this case. Names that didn’t match social security numbers. Unpaid pensions to vanishing police sergeants with fictitious addresses. Photos beneath carpets, shreds of newspaper under mattresses . . . none of it really connected, and yet all of it felt the same.
‘Back to the precinct,’ Roth said. ‘Need to check on the social security number and see if AT&T ever had such a customer as Michael McCullough.’
Miller didn’t reply.
Took them another half an hour to get to the Second. By the time they arrived it was quarter after five. Roth went down to the computer suite in the basement while Miller went upstairs to see Lassiter. Lassiter was gone, some meeting at the Eighth. Had left word that if either Miller or Roth showed up they were to call him on his cell. Miller figured it could wait until they had something to tell him.
Miller checked for progress on the APB. He spoke to Metz briefly, listened to him bitch about the number of time-wasters that called up on something like this. The whole thing was dispiriting. ‘Always the way,’ he told Miller. ‘The lead that looks the most promising is a waste of fucking time, the obvious waste of time turns out to be the thing itself. I tell you, man, this is just so fucking frustrating.’
Miller left Metz in the first floor hallway and went back to his room.
Roth had returned. ‘You wanna guess?’
Miller smiled, raised his eyebrows. ‘The social security number is bullshit.’
‘Nope, the social security number is not bullshit. It really does come up with Michael McCullough, but the Michael McCullough it comes up with died in 1981.’
‘You what?’
‘That’s right. 1981. Our Sergeant McCullough, sixteen years of loyal service and retired from the Washington Police Department in 2003, has actually been dead for the better part of twenty-five years.’
‘No,’ Miller said. ‘No fucking way.’ He dropped heavily into his chair. ‘What in God’s name is going on here? Does none of this actually go back to a real person?’
Roth shook his head. ‘I called AT&T as well. They said they have no such address on their system, and as far as a customer named Michael McCullough is concerned, they did have one but he discontinued his service in 1981.’
‘Don’t tell me. Because he died, right?’
‘I can only assume it’s the same guy.’
‘Jesus Christ . . . so what does this leave us with?’
‘Nothing,’ Roth said quietly. ‘In essence we have nothing, Robert. Fact of the matter is that every lead stops dead. The person doesn’t exist. The address is bullshit. The phone bill is fabricated to get an account opened to receive a pension that never comes. None of it makes sense because it’s not supposed to make sense, and when it can’t make sense it’s because someone intended for it not to make sense. You get what I’m saying?’
Miller nodded. He took a breath, closed his eyes. He massaged his temples with his fingertips. ‘So we’re back to square one,’ he said. ‘Back right where we started.’
‘Unless something comes from this picture we have . . . unless someone identifies this guy and he does in fact have something to do with Catherine Sheridan . . . or maybe he can just tell us something about her that opens up another line of investigation.’
‘Enough,’ Miller said. ‘I’ve really had enough for today. I’m gonna cut out, go get some rest. Can you tell Metz and whoever else that if anything comes up they should call one of us?’
‘Sure I can. You think I should stay here?’
‘Go home,’ Miller said. ‘Way this thing is going I don’t think either of us are gonna be home long. Lassiter hears we’ve gone he’s gonna call us right back in.’
‘I’ll go see Metz before I leave,’ Roth said.
Miller sat there, head in his hands, for the better part of half an hour, and then he rose, exhaustion like a deadweight on his back, and made his way out of the building and down toward the car. Didn’t know what he would do. Didn’t want to think about it. Enough was enough for now.
By the time he reached Church Street he was having difficulty keeping his eyes open.
Harriet called to him as he made his way through to the stairs.
‘I’ve been up all night,’ Miller told her. ‘I am so tired, so damned tired.’
‘So go sleep,’ she said. ‘Go sleep, and when you are done sleeping you come down here and eat something and tell me what is going on with your life, okay?’
Miller smiled, reached out and took her hand.
‘Go,’ she said. ‘I will make food for you.’
Upstairs, Miller took his overcoat off and collapsed in a chair in the front room. He did not ask himself where the investigation was going. The sense of foreboding looming over his thoughts was something he tried not to think about. He did not question his own sense of responsibility for the death of Natasha Joyce. He did not ask himself if his own life was in danger. He tried not to picture Marilyn Hemmings’ face, the brief personal conversation they had shared. He did not think of Jennifer Ann Irving, the way she had looked when her body had been found. Like Natasha Joyce. Like someone had stamped her to death. The IAD investigation, the endless questions, the unaccepted answers, the sleepless nights, the newspaper reports, the assumptions, the accusations . . .
The sense that life had closed down, and then it had opened up again and presented him with something that was big enough to kill him.
He had been fooling himself. The Irving case, the death of Brandon Thomas - these things were nothing in the face of what was now happening.
It was nineteen minutes past six, evening of Wednesday the 15th of November. Catherine Sheridan had been dead for four days, Natasha Joyce a little more than twenty-six hours.
Robert Miller’s cell phone would wake him at quarter after eight, and Al Roth would be on the other end of the line, and Al Roth would tell Miller something that would stop his heart. Just for a second, no more than that, but it would stop his heart.
Two hours of calm before the storm. Just for a little while the world slowed down for Robert Miller, and for this - if nothing else - he was grateful.
M
y first killing was not significant. Nowhere near as significant as I had believed it would be.
My first killing was a small man in a beige suit. It took place on September 29th - a hot day, somewhere in the nineties - and the small man in the beige suit had dark sweat patches beneath his arms. Sweated so much it went through his shirt, through his jacket, and the smell of him filled the narrow confines of the office where he worked. All I knew was that he was involved with La Allianza, the Alliance, and he had something he should not have had, or he knew something he should not have known, or he planned to say something to someone that he should not say. It didn’t really matter.
Managua was a nightmare of its own creation. There were numerous safe houses and hotel rooms scattered across the city, all of which were changed frequently, used perhaps once or twice, everything paid in cash. I did not speak Spanish, but Catherine
did. Place names were bastardized into American slang. Batahóla Norte and Batahóla Sur became North and South Butthole respectively. Reparto Jardines de Managua became simply the
Gardens, Barrio el Cortijo became the Farmhouse, Barrio Loma Verde was known as Green Hillock, and the street names - Pista les Brisas, Pista Heroes y Martires, Paseo Salvador Allende became Breezes, Martyrs and Salvador. It was easier to remember, and for those who did not speak English it served to confuse them.
Aside from Catherine as my controller, I had a section director. His name was Lewis Cotten. Mid-thirties, family for two or three generations out of OSS, the birth of the CIA, and knew more about the history of the thing than anyone else I’d met.
‘Bill Casey is planning to roll back the communist empire singlehandedly, ’ he said, and gave a coarse laugh. ‘You know he
was OSS, right? And chairman of the SEC? Guy’s a hard-headed
ball-breaking son-of-a-bitch. My father used to play golf with him. Said he’d never met anyone so single-minded in his life.’
Lewis Cotten and I founded an awkward relationship. He knew why I was there. I was the proverbial blunt instrument. I later learned that Cotten was no stranger to this element of the game. Though he would supervise and direct the killing of Nicaragua’s foreign minister, Miguel d’Escoto in 1983, and then in 1984 the assassination of the nine commandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate, Lewis Cotten had been involved directly in attempts, successful and unsuccessful, on the lives of the chief of Panama Intelligence, General Manuel Noriega; Mobutu Sese Seko, the President of Zaire; Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica; Gaddafi, Khomeini, and the Moroccan Armed Forces commander, General Ahmed Dlimi. In 1985, after I had left Nicaragua for the last time, he was involved in the deaths of a further eighty people when an attempt was made on the life of the Lebanese Shi’ite leader, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.
Cotten seemed to live solely to see others die. It was his purpose, his motivation, and sometimes when we met for another assignment
he would grip my shoulder, grin broadly, and say ‘So you
wanna know which unsuspecting asshole is going to the gallows today then?’ That was his expression - go to the gallows - and though we never hung anyone, though the means of despatch was invariably close-range sidearm or long-range rifle shots, the expression never changed. Between September 1981 and December 1984 - those three years when Catherine Sheridan and I lived out of each other’s pockets; three years when we walked from one day to the next and never really knew if we had just survived or just begun the last of them, three years when we drank and smoked and fucked like it was our last chance for anything - during those three years we were responsible for the deaths of ninety-three people. Lewis Cotten got the order, Catherine organized the diary, I attended the meetings. It was a good arrangement. I was shot once. Caught it in the thigh. They had surgeons and doctors on hand. I was out of service for no more than three weeks.
After my leg healed I went back to work. ‘Jesus,’ Cotten said, when
I walked back into the hotel room where he’d set up his office, a hotel on the edge of the Residencial Linda Vista district north of
the Laguna de Asososca. ‘How fucking long does it take to get over
a fucking superficial gunshot wound? You have any idea the kind of shit I’ve had to manage while you’ve been resting your weary little self for the past three fucking weeks? Christ almighty, anyone’d think this was the fucking army. Take a little R ’n’ R why don’t you? Dammit Robey, you need to get your act together. Get that girlfriend of yours down here and let’s talk about what the fuck has been going on while you’ve been on vacation.’
But that conversation took place in the middle of 1983, and I have overlooked the first one. A killing that should have been meaningful, should have been life-changing. But it was not. At least not for me. It was only afterwards, late that night, as I sat in the window of a hotel room on Avenida 28a on the east side of Barrio el Cortijo, the Farmhouse, that I realized the significance of what had happened. The important thing was not that I had killed someone. The important thing was that I had killed someone and I had felt a great deal of nothing.
Back at Langley during those weeks of training, we had talked endlessly about the mental and emotional effects, the psychological impact that killing could have on someone. It was all talk. We spent our lives talking it seemed. We were told that some people, despite the training and the mind-modification procedures, despite our certainty that we were doing the right thing . . . well, some people would not be able to go through with it. And then there were some who would go through with it, who would actually line up the sight and look down the barrel and pull the trigger and watch a small red knot bloom in someone’s forehead, and associate cause with effect, and understand that they themselves had done this thing - terminated a human existence. Only later
would they collide with the sledgehammer of reality, and they would puke, maybe
get drunk, maybe
sit and sob about what their
mother would have thought if she had known what they had done.