Let Slip the Dogs of War: A Bard's Bed & Breakfast Mystery #1 (7 page)

“Don’t worry, ma’am. We’ll identify her.”

“But if you can’t, what will happen?” Don’t
ask me why, but I persisted. I was worried the poor girl would
somehow slip through the cracks, forever disconnected from her real
identity, her real family, her real life. She would become a
statistic, an unknown body found in the woods on the shores of Lake
Champlain, with no one to mourn her.

“We take samples of her DNA and we list her
on the Doe Network, a national website for missing persons.”

“What will you do with her body, store it
until you find her family?”

The investigator’s eyes narrowed as he
studied me. I suddenly thought that he was someone who was often
underestimated. Behind that youthful face was a native intelligence
that was not easily deceived.

“If she’s not claimed in about ten days, she
gets offered up to the area medical schools for research,” he
explained. “If they don’t want the body, and she died of natural
causes, she might get cremated. Otherwise, she’s likely to be
buried. Why?”

“She just seems so young, so innocent.” I
looked at the cabana, where I could still see the young girl’s body
leaning against the wall. “Can my husband and I claim her?”

“What?” Ben looked slightly stunned. “Hold on
there, Bea.”

“She was someone’s daughter. She deserves a
proper burial,” I insisted. “We can’t just ship her off to a
medical school as a cadaver. It’s so...so indecent! It’s not like
we even know who she is. What if her family turns up later? How do
we tell them there’s nothing left to bury, Ben?”

“And you think we should pay for her
funeral?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“We could take up a collection,” said one of
the little old ladies, inserting herself into the equation. “The
Janie Doe Memorial Fund.”

“Yes, Elaine. What a wonderful idea,” another
of them agreed. “My Jimmy is the vice president at the branch in
town. He can set up an account for the fund. We’ll call the
Sentinel Gazette and get them to write it up. That should bring in
some donations”

“Well, if you’re going to have your son set
up a fund, my son can arrange the service at the First Church,” a
third elderly woman decided. “After all, Stewie’s a deacon.”

“I’d like to be a part of this,” said the man
in the Red Sox cap.

“Me, too,” said another passenger.

“And me.” One by one, folks joined the
movement to bury the dead girl. The tour group waiting on the dock
convinced the captain to give them paper and pen, so they could
start a mailing list of names of willing contributors. Even some of
the firemen wanted in on the plan.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” I sighed, wagging a
chastising finger in Ben’s direction. “There are still decent
people in this world.”

“Let’s wait until that fund is established
before we throw accolades at the public.”

“Cynic,” I retorted, brushing away a loose
strand of hair from my face. I realized I looked a mess after my
foray into concealing the inconvenient body in the cabana. I
wondered if part of my need to bury the poor girl was more a result
of feeling guilty for treating her corpse so deceitfully than
because I am a true humanitarian. Ben always says that when push
comes to shove, people save themselves first out of necessity, and
then allow themselves to be moral and decent when the going gets
easier and the effort seems likely to succeed. In his opinion, very
few people are actually willing to throw themselves under a train
to save their fellow human beings, although some will consider it,
sometimes after the fact and usually with an excuse as to why it
was not a viable option after all.

“Optimist,” he countered, as if that were a
bad thing to be.

“Rogue,” I offered. “Scoundrel.”

“Opportunist. Survivor. I live to fight
another day, my love. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Would you
rather be the widow of a dead knight, armor shining brightly, or
the wife of a warm, breathing man who lives to adore you?” Ben
wrapped an arm around my shoulder and squeezed. “Well?”

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” I replied,
using the old vaudeville line.

“That’s my Bea,” he grinned, kissing my
forehead, “as contentious as ever.”

Twenty minutes later, Ben and I were headed
to the airport to pick up Mr. Williams, now arriving. I called the
“travel agency” for the confirmation phrase and photo. I’m not sure
what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t what I got.

“Mr. Williams is a woman?”

“Let’s see,” Ben insisted, taking his eyes
off the road as we barreled down I-91 in moderate traffic.
“Hmm...not what I was expecting.”

“Why do you say like that?” I asked,
curiosity getting the better of me. “You think she’s hot?”

Ben cut me off in mid-sentence with a cluck.
“Bea, you are missing the point. Mr. Williams is not a guy. If we
were deliberately informed he was, it may have been to draw out
Philippe and his cohorts.”

“Oh. And we don’t know who the cohorts are,
do we?”

“Given his penchant for lying and deceiving,
it may be an effort on the part of the CIA to determine who Grapon
is serving on this mission. It sure as hell isn’t America.”

“You mean he’s a double agent?” The thought
was horrifying, given the dead body in the Ephesus Suite.

“And then some.”

“Which means what, that he’s working for
three or four different countries?” I thought about that a moment.
“But how do you know which one is the real benefactor of his
intelligence games?”

“That’s the trouble. You don’t. If he’s
working for the Russians, he could also be helping the Syrians or
any of the other folks in the region the Russians are trying to
assist. That means he’ll have back-up from several different
directions. And if he’s playing the CIA, which I suspect he is,
they already doubt him, because ‘Mr. Williams’ is a woman. She may
be just a messenger, like the dead girl probably was.”

“Oh, this always gets so complicated!” I
groaned. “Why can’t spies be like normal people?”

“You can look at this situation two ways,
Bea. On the whole, spies are deceitful, lying bastards who take
advantage of human weakness to further their ends. Scary and
worrisome. On the smaller scale, most spies have specific goals to
accomplish and bosses who decide what gets done and where it gets
done. If we didn’t have war, we wouldn’t need spies, but as long as
despots and dictators are willing to go to extremes, we have to
protect governments and people from harm.”

“Tell that to the poor dead girl in the body
bag!” I snapped. “I’m sure it will be great comfort, God rest her
soul!”

“That’s the price of freedom, my love.
Ruthless men will do ruthless things to achieve their ruthless
goals, even kill a young woman.”

“I warned you about Philippe, Benedick. I
told you he would bring trouble with him.”

“You did, but there’s a reason the CIA wanted
us to let things happen, Bea. If we had chased him away, he would
have gone somewhere else to do the dirty deed. Instead, he did it
on our turf, and that means the damage can be contained.

“How does that help us?”

“The man who stole the girl’s body put it in
our cabana for a reason, just as he set that fire for a reason. We
were being set up by Grapon and his associates. That was no
accident Grapon was a passenger on the tour boat.”

“Or that he disappeared?”

“Exactly. He probably was trying to leave us
holding the bag. Imagine what would have happened if the cabana had
burned and with it, the dead body. We’d be under investigation for
months. What’s the result of that? No bed and breakfast business
for us, at least not a safe haven for spies.”

“Does that mean the Bard’s Bed &
Breakfast is kaput?” The question hung in the air through the long
silence that followed. Finally, with a deep sigh, Ben admitted the
reality.

“Possibly. It depends on how fast we can find
Grapon and neutralize his ass. And we also have to catch his
friends. But I suspect that whoever is providing security to the
CIA is using private satellite surveillance and other means to keep
an eye on things in Arden Woods. They probably knew that Grapon was
betraying us and needed to let things happen.”

“But that girl died,” I reminded my husband.
“How is that fair?”

“Bea, we still don’t know who she is or what
she is,” he told me in a firm, but gentle voice. “And we also don’t
know what killed her or why she’s dead. She could have been a part
of the plot. She’s probably collateral damage. Sometimes it’s
unavoidable.”

“It’s not fair,” I decided.

“Life never is, babe.” Ben reached over and
patted me in his effort to console me. I wasn’t having any of it. I
still thought the poor dead girl deserved better, and I was damned
if I was going to allow a murderer like Philippe Grapon to go free.
“We may never know the truth about what happened. It’s possible
that this is part of a critical operation overseas. It may have
been an effort by a hostile intelligence service to disrupt our
efforts in another country. Take Syria, for example. The carnage is
horrific, the Russians are backing the Syrian regime, and we’re
poised to pitch in to help the rebels. The outcome affects Middle
Eastern policy. If the Russians succeed in shoring up Assad, he
will reward them for their assistance, and their financial coffers
will grow, their influence in the region will grow, and they’ll be
sitting pretty. If the rebels win, there will be a change in
leadership, new opportunities to shape the new government, and a
potential chance to prevent more chaos in the region. Every country
with a viable interest is scrambling to find a crack to exploit,
Bea. This one girl’s death might be horrible, but if it prevents
hundreds more people from being killed, can we really say she died
in vain?”

“I really hate this business,” I told him
grimly. “I hate seeing the personal cost of war, up close and
personal.”

“But for all you’ve seen, my love, this is
only the tip of the iceberg above the water’s surface.”

In all the years I had known him and loved
him, Ben had never spoken of his experiences as a spy. For the most
part, the missions he had undertaken were highly classified. But I
also knew that he kept his secrets to protect me. He didn’t want me
thinking about the brutality of war and fragility of the human
spirit when subjected to great pressure. He had seen and done
things of which he chose never to speak, but he did them as a man
with as clear a conscience as possible. That meant he sometimes
brooded into the wee small hours of the night, sequestered in his
armchair before a roaring fire, remembering those whose lives were
lost, those whose lives were betrayed, those whose lives were
uprooted by all of the smoke and mirrors that was the cornerstone
of intelligence services and networks around the world. Ben lived
his life by a code of honor as best he could, clinging to it like a
life raft amidst the flotsam and jetsam of a disaster in an ocean
crowded by sharks. I knew it wasn’t easy for him to accept the
things he knew he had to do to get the job done. The life of a spy
wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t kind, but better men and women who
carried the mantle as Ben did, than to leave it to the Philippe
Grapons of the world. The French had their hands full with that
bastard.

We drove in silence, still twenty minutes
from the airport. I busied myself with the scenery, but even as I
watched the roadside fly by, I was struck by the possibilities.
What if Philippe was only working for the French, and they were
trying to help the Syrians? Why did Ben think the Syrians were
involved in the first place? And what if Philippe was following
orders for the French, and someone at Direction Générale de la
Sécurité Extérieure was the real bad guy? That’s the problem with
the spy business. You can be false-flagged so many times, you think
you’re working for the good guys, when it’s really the bad guys
pretending to be the good guys. Sometimes it’s the good guys,
pretending to be the bad guys, while still being the good guys.
Without a scorecard, it’s hard to tell who’s on the right side,
who’s on the wrong side, and even who’s on the winning side.

“Why did you say it might be the Syrians that
Grapon is working with?” I broke the silence with that
question.

“No real reason,” he told me, shaking his
head. Liar. No reason to let him get away with that, I decided.

“Ben, why did you say it might be the
Syrians?

“I might have heard a rumor from a birdie
across the river.” That usually meant someone in the Washington FBI
field office dropped a hint to the CIA liaison, who then passed it
along to the rightful heirs of the information, so they could act
on it appropriately.

“Meaning?”

“It’s possible that Grapon was photographed
meeting with a Russian and a Syrian counterpart on a hiking trail
in Damascus two weeks ago.”

“He was in Syria?”

Chapter Eight --

“No, Virginia. Damascus, Virginia. It’s up in
the Blue Ridge Mountains, near Mount Rogers National Recreation
area. It’s a favorite meeting area outside Washington for Middle
Easterners.”

“Oh,” I said, somewhat surprised by the
revelation. It was scary to think bad guys were plotting along the
Appalachian Trail.

“When spies from hostile intelligence
services need to huddle together in the US and don’t want to get
caught at it, they find a US location with a foreign name. Say that
it’s Paris, Virginia, or maybe Berlin, Maryland. The CIA station
chief waits for them to show up in the announced locale overseas,
so it wastes CIA resources. Meanwhile, they’re really trying to
elude the FBI here in the States. If they provide their
conspirators with a set of GPS coordinates, hiding it on a blog or
in a chat room communication that isn’t noticed by law enforcement,
they can get together without any watchful eyes monitoring them
most of the time. In this particular case, they said openly in a
phone call that they would meet again in Damascus, like they
planned to go to Syria. Instead, they did some climbing in
Virginia. My little birdie friend said the Russian laid down some
sensors on the trail, so they would know when other folks were
hiking in the area.”