And a woman, older, also naked, also bound, treated the same way. Both of them savagely beaten to death with the same three-foot section of lead pipe, both dead not five hours all told. It didn’t take a forensic team to read it, it was all there in front of them, the pipe, the blood spatter not yet dry, even the white plastic suit the killer had worn, peeled off, and thrown in a corner like a condom after sex.
The three of them stood there, in a row, three good people—the English aristocrat, the Ukrainian policeman, and the gaunt, gray-faced Cleaner—all of them staring into the pit together.
“We failed,” said Mandy after a long while, “didn’t we?”
“Yes,” said Dalton. “But what did we fail at? What was going on here? What did this all mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Mandy, “but I think I need to leave now.”
“Yes,” said the young captain, swallowing, “so do I.”
CIA HQ
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
THE ANNEX
They held the hearing in Room 19 of the Annex, a large wood-paneled conference room buried deep in the windowless interior of the building, shielded and armored, and lit from above by rippled glass that shed a diffuse violet light down on a huge oblong table of hammered oak surrounded by sixteen evenly spaced tan leather chairs. The room was filled with the kind of humming pressurized silence that comes from filtered compressors deep in the basement and the inaudible hypersonic whine of antisurveillance electronics. If you pulled out a pistol and shot yourself while sitting in one of these chairs, the sound of the shot would be like a puff of wind under a locked door. Not even God would hear your brains hit the wall behind you.
At the head of the table, flanked by two unsmiling aides—one female, one undecided—sat a whippet-thin, sharp-featured woman of indeterminate age with cool gray eyes and a bell of shining blue-black hair, wearing a charcoal gray pantsuit and a white blouse, open enough to remind the others that she was a woman, closed enough to remind the others that she was one of the “Virgins of Vigilance,” part of a team sent over from the Counter-Intelligence Analysis Group to do some long-overdue housecleaning here at the National Clandestine Service.
Her name, it will come as no surprise, was Mariah Vale, and before her lay a sheaf of papers that contained the essential details of one old man’s history of deceit, betrayal, perfidy, and treason.
The old man in question—Deacon Cather, Deputy Director of the National Clandestine Service, who was currently suspended pending the results of this hearing—was apparently at ease. He was beautifully turned out in a satiny charcoal pin-striped suit tailor-made for his Lincolnesque body. Tall, angular, lean, almost cadaverous, with yellow skin and tobacco-stained teeth, dry, cold eyes, a leathery reptilian neck, and large hands with flat nails, he sat with them folded comfortably on the bare table in front of him: his calm, still gaze rested upon the pink-tinged forehead of Mariah Vale the way a hawk might look at a hen.
Next to him in the nearly empty room sat Micah Dalton, acting in a way as his aide in this matter. Dalton’s left cheek still showed a livid scar where a bullet had scored a path across his face only a few weeks before.
In front of Dalton was a leather case, battered, tan, with gold fittings, unlatched but unopened. Dalton was wearing a navy blue pinstripe, a snow-white shirt, a gold-and-blue-striped tie held in place with a gold collar bar, and an expression of cold dislike in his pale blue eyes.
Somewhere off in the dark, a camera rolled and a recorder spun slowly. This was the third hour of the proceedings, and the matter had come down to the proof, as these things usually do, and Mariah Vale had “the proof ” in her bony-fingered hands as she leaned forward to address the hidden watchers.
“We have here the decryption of Riga 157-alpha hotel, dated the twentieth of May, 1973, done by Miss Keating’s staff and overseen by Miss Keating herself, which, considering the death of her son only a short time ago, calls for the highest commendation.
“We have all read the transcript, the decryption of which has been verified by an independent unit of the Glass Cutters, under the supervision of the DNI herself, but I will present it here in hard copy so you may refresh your memory if you need to. Is that satisfactory, Mr. Cather?”
“It is,” said Cather in his Tidewater drawl, his Easter Island gravity undiminished, his humorless smile a thin curve on his bloodless lips.
Dalton reached out and took a copy from the pile, laid it out in front of Deacon Cather:
New York 20 MAY 1973 1425—WALDORF
PREACHER confirms to KEVIN that WG entry
Connects to RN. PREACHER confirms recordings exist of RN
discussing entry cover-up. PREACHER confirms
consequences.
Will be terminal to RN. Congress intends to force
RN resignation (six groups unrecovered), ADC in
Paris (nine groups unrecovered), confirmed by
Preacher.
In direct communication with (unrecovered sequence).
Recommend immediate communication with Giap to:
Secure treaty (nine groups unrecovered) document (eighteen
groups unrecovered).
By hand to Gordon by Preacher (four groups unrecovered).
Also Preacher insists on extended payment grade
citing:
Extreme risk of (six groups unrecovered) in reference.
To Hudson, Garza, others (eleven groups unrecovered).
Cable wire/Kevin to Gordon, copy Karla,
NY, 20 May 1973. End.
“You are aware,” said Mariah Vale, “that Kevin has been confirmed by the man himself to be Oleg Kalugin, who from 1965 to 1970 was the so-called Press Officer of the Tass News Agency in New York, and who admitted, after his defection to the United States, that he recruited many agents from the diplomatic and military personnel, who were at that time active in the States, including attachés to the United Nations? You have heard of him?”
“Heard of him, Miss Vale? Goodness yes. I have gotten drunk with him. A lovely man.”
“And you’re also aware that Gordon is Vladimir Kryuchkov, who was Kalugin’s immediate superior, based at Moscow Center, and that Kryuchkov was the head of the KGB’s counterintelligence division, and that Kryuchkov reported directly to Yuri Andropov?”
“It is my job to be aware of these things. I was aware of such things when you were still an attractive young woman, Miss Vale.”
“It is our contention that you, Mr. Cather, are the agent known as Preacher—”
“Come now,” said Cather. “Deacon? Preacher? Would they be that transparent?”
“They called Alger Hiss Ales. Winston Churchill was Boar. Their cables are full of such clumsy pseudonyms. So, you have admitted, for the record, that on this date—the date in question—you were in fact the Aide de Camp—the ADC—in service to our representatives at the Paris Peace Accords?”
“Yes, along with Colonel Garza, Colonel Hudson, Major Prescott, and Colonel Dale, all of whom were attached as military advisers to our envoys at the Paris Accords and all of whom made many trips between New York and Washington and Paris during those very hectic weeks—”
“We are not concerned with all of these trips, Mr. Cather, but only with this one particular trip—a trip which you admit that only you made, a trip during which you conveyed critical information concerning the Watergate break-ins that convinced the Soviets that President Nixon was about to be investigated in connection with these break-ins, an investigation that would very likely render moot his prior guarantees to the government of South Vietnam to return to extensive Linebacker operations over Hanoi and Haiphong if the North were to violate the terms of the Accord. In a word, Mr. Cather, we are suggesting that your treason in this matter caused us to forfeit the Vietnam War.”
“My dear Miss Vale, the Watergate affair began on the night of June seventeenth, in Washington, in 1972, and by the date in question here, the twentieth of May, 1973, a blind bat in a barn in Fargo could have told you that Nixon was in serious trouble.”
Vale came back with heightened choler.
“Nixon was not under
serious
threat until the revelations concerning the taped evidence—the so-called Nixon Tapes—surfaced in the fall of 1973. There was, however, a lot of talk in D.C. and New York in the weeks before that he had, like many other Presidents before him, kept accurate records of everything that transpired in the Oval Office. We have shown that in March of ’seventy-three you yourself were made aware of this situation in a conversation, a taped conversation between yourself and Colonel Garza—”
“Who is dead, by the way. A suicide, you may recall?”
“The tapes are still with us, Mr. Cather. Do you deny that such a conversation took place?”
“I do not.”
“So you admit that you were in possession of prior information concerning the Nixon Tapes—”
“I was in possession of professional speculation between two military intelligence officers concerning a matter that was of great interest to every American, Miss Vale. The fact that the FBI was taping Colonel Garza in connection with possible accounting fraud at Fort Campbell—”
“That does not negate the—”
Dalton leaned forward here, opening his case.
“Miss Vale, I think I can help clear this up for all of us.”
“Captain Dalton, late of the Fifth Special Forces, for the record, and now one of Mr. Cather’s more controversial assistants over at Clandestine Services. Yes, how could you clear this up, I wonder?”
Her tone was sarcasm laced with venom.
God help Clandestine,
thought Dalton,
if she ever got her fangs in it
.
Dalton smiled back at her, reached into the case, and pulled out a pile of papers, passed one across to Miss Vale, who pulled it in close and peered down at it over her reading glasses.
“The first is a statement from a Mr. Dylan Keating—Briony Keating’s ex-husband, now facing several charges under the Patriot Act—who states in this affidavit that eleven months ago he used a dating service known as ‘Odessa Flowers
dot.com
’—I have enclosed a web shot—and that Odessa Flowers provides a forum for American men to contact Ukrainian and Russian women with a view to contracting marriage . . . of a sort . . . And Dylan Keating further states that he traveled in the fall of that year to visit a Marina Kelo, a nurse who was living in Odessa, in the Ukraine. We have shown you already, in a film clip, that a man known only to us as Piotr referred in this film clip to a man he called ‘her husband,’ stating that this man had provided, for reasons we don’t have to get into, background information on Miss Briony Keating, his ex-wife. We have also shown that Odessa Flowers was run by an outfit called BUG/Arkangel and that it was a KGB front specifically designed to identify possible intelligence sources inside the United States. Dylan Keating admits telling this Marina Kelo that his wife was a top encryption analyst in the National Security Agency. Marina Kelo was a paid stringer for the KGB, and as soon as she heard this she took the information to the KGB, who encouraged her to go back to Odessa and to learn everything she could about Dylan Keating’s wife—”
“None of this in any way mitigates—”
“So this scam began there, in Odessa—”
“‘Scam’? This is not a scam—”
“Miss Vale, how many men were in a position to convey this information about the Nixon Tapes to the Soviet Union and how many of those men were also attached to the Paris Accords as military intelligence advisers?”
“You mean the short list?”
Dalton tapped the third sheet of paper.
“There are the names of five men, all of whom could have been the source for the information conveyed to the Soviets—”
“So you don’t contend that the information was never conveyed—”
“No. The historical record is undeniable. Nixon’s commitment to the Linebacker campaign forced the North Vietnamese to the table in Paris in January of 1973. On April twentieth, he and Thieu met at San Clemente, where Nixon confirmed his absolute determination to resume the Linebacker bombing campaign if the North Vietnamese broke
any
of the agreements under the Paris Accords. If the purpose of our intervention in Southeast Asia was to prevent a Soviet proxy from taking over South Vietnam, then the war was won—”
“There are conflicting views on that,” said Mariah Vale.
“This isn’t about
views,
Miss Vale, it’s about an historical fact. It’s also a fact that overflight surveillance missions show the Russians shipping arms and matériel to the North Vietnamese, beginning in May of 1973. This is a few days after the Nixon Tapes rumor reached Andropov, delivered by Preacher through Kryuchkov. By August ninth, the Democrats, using Watergate as a lever, lowered the hammer on Nixon and the Republicans, forcing the passage of the Case-Church Amendment. The Case-Church Amendment effectively ended any possibility of further United States support for South Vietnam.”
“A quagmire, as we all know now—”
“To people who dislike all military operations, there’s always a quagmire around to jump into. By the summer, the Russians were going full speed ahead in their support of the North Vietnamese, something they would never have done if they hadn’t known that Nixon was going to be in serious trouble. Nixon resigned on August ninth, 1974. Saigon fell in April of ’seventy-five. None of that would have happened if Congress had backed Nixon about the Linebacker campaigns. The Soviets would have let South Vietnam stand. Millions would still be alive.”