Not long after resigning his commission with the Navy and leaving ISAG, Tanner was approached with an offer by his late mentor, Chief Boatswain’s Mate Ned Billings. Billings was a part of a quasi-civilian intelligence group called Holystone. Run by Leland Dutcher, a former deputy director of intelligence for the CIA, Holystone was what is known in the espionage business as a “fix-it company,” a small collection of special operators and intelligence gatherers who handled the riskiest of jobs.
Pitched to Dutcher by then President Ronald Reagan in the early eighties, Holystone was designed to address a blank spot in the U.S.’s intelligence community — namely, a group that could follow bad guys into the gray areas where military action was too much, diplomacy was too little, and standard intelligence measures were indefensible — in other words, a group that worked by “deniable methods.”
For Holystone, this arm’s-length relationship with the CIA and its many spinoffs was both a blessing and a curse. Due largely to Dutcher’s universal reputation as the most even-keeled and trustworthy DDI of his generation, Holystone operated with a fair amount of autonomy, both in budget and in methods. It also operated at a fraction of the CIA’s cafeteria allotment, had full access to the U.S. intelligence system, and was exempt from the political and budgetary squabbles the CIA had to fight at every turn.
Holystone’s curse came from its raison d’être: deniability. Holystone, its people, and its mission didn’t exist. If caught somewhere they shouldn’t be, doing something they shouldn’t be doing, operatives were on their own. As Dutcher explained it when Tanner had first come aboard, “It’s a brutal necessity — brutal for us, necessary for the president.”
Tanner didn’t have to think long about the offer. Not only did he trust in Billings’s judgment, but like anyone who spent any time in the intelligence business, Briggs also knew of Leland Dutcher’s reputation. If he was at Holystone’s helm, it had to be something special.
Dutcher was an old-school spook, having learned the business first with the OSS as a member of a Jedburgh Team dropped into occupied France to assist the Resistance against the German Wehrmacht, then with the CIA as it fought tooth and nail against the KGB and the East German Stazi in Cold War Berlin.
As an agent controller, he’d won and lost both battles and people the world had never heard of and never would. He’d seen the CIA go from a small collection of case officers that succeeded through improvisation, dedication, and guile, to a premier intelligence agency armed with technology that had been unimaginable even twenty years before.
Through it all, Dutcher had learned an unforgettable lesson: It was people, not technology, that drove the intelligence business. Cameras, microphones, and computers are a poor substitute for “eyeballs on the ground”—the impressions of a trained and seasoned spook.
Soon after joining Holystone, Tanner realized he’d found a home, something he’d missed since leaving the tight-knit community of ISAG. In addition to Dutcher, there was Walter Oaken, his second-in-command — or as Dutcher often called him, “the oil that keeps the machine running”—and Tanner’s oldest friend, Ian Cahil, whom Tanner had recruited into Holystone a few years before. They were good people. He counted himself lucky.
After leaving Vetsch, Tanner took 95 north to Washington, then 301 over the bridge across the bay and south to Tunis Mills. Holystone’s office, a Frank Lloyd Wrightesque building surrounded by Japanese maples and gold-mound spirea, sat perched above the banks of Leeds Creek, one of the hundreds of inlets along the eastern shore.
Tanner pulled into the parking lot, walked up the path, and swiped his card key in the reader. At the muted click he pushed through the door into the foyer. Holystone’s layout was uncluttered, with high, vaulted ceilings and offices lining a sunken conference room. He walked back to Oaken’s office, poked his head in, and said, “Got a minute?” then continued on to Dutcher’s office.
Dutcher looked up from a file and peered at Tanner through the pair of half-glasses perched on his nose. “I seem to recall you’re on vacation.”
Briggs sat down on the sofa. “I love my job.”
Oaken walked in, handed Tanner a cup of coffee, and took the seat before Dutcher’s desk.
“Glad to hear it,” Dutcher said with a smile. “Now go home.”
“I’ve got a situation.”
Oaken asked, “Vetsch?”
Tanner nodded.
Dutcher laid aside the file. “Gill Vetsch? What’s going on?”
“He called me this morning. His daughter, Susanna, went missing in Paris.”
“When?”
“Two weeks ago. She’s with the DEA, but beyond that, he doesn’t know much.”
“FCI,” Oaken ventured, referring to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Foreign Cooperative Investigations branch.
“That was my guess,” Tanner replied. “Gill got the call from the DEA’s public affairs officer, who sounded like he was reading from a script. That, and something else Gill said makes me think she was working intell — undercover, probably.”
“What’s that?” asked Dutcher.
“She was home for a few days at Easter. Gill said she’d changed — her hair was dyed, she had piercings and tattoos, her clothes were bordello ratty. She was withdrawn, distant …”
Dutcher nodded. “Makes sense. I know the DEA’s been cozying up to the French SDCB the last few years. A lot of heroin has been streaming into Paris.”
“The French connection lives,” Tanner said. Since the SDCB — the Sub-Directorate, Criminal Business — had begun cracking down on organized crime’s monopoly of gambling machines, the underworld had returned its attention to more traditional sources of income. And with heroin having again become chic in the U.S., the market was booming.
“Since when is the DEA putting people on the ground in Europe?” Oaken asked.
“Good question,” Dutcher replied. “What else did Gill know?”
“Not much,” Tanner said. “He pushed it, made a lot of phone calls, but got nowhere.”
“No unidentified bodies over there?”
“No.”
“Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean much.”
While overseas DEA casualties had increased dramatically in the past five years, few bodies were ever found, as European drug organizations took a page from the Mafia’s book and started making sure their victims disappeared forever — especially U.S. agents, who were particularly despised. The dictum in the french underworld was Non allé, pas complètement—Not gone, not dead. The victim is not fully dead until they disappear.
Thinking of that, Tanner felt his heart pound a little harder. She’s alive, he told himself. On the drive from Willowbrook he’d had time to think about Susanna Vetsch. Though she was now a woman of twenty-five, part of him would always see her as a bright and happy fourteen-year-old girl. Tanner had come to think of Susanna as the daughter he’d never had, and in return he’d become the uncle in whom she confided and relied.
Tanner’s wife had died years before in an avalanche on a mountain in Colorado. Before then he’d never given much thought to the saying “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” having accepted it with the wisdom of ignorance. In the years that followed Elle’s death, during those times when he let himself think too much, he decided the phrase was at best cavalier, at worst cruel. The pain had faded with time, of course, but it never quite disappeared, a dull empty ache in the pit of his chest.
Not that life was bad. In fact, life was pretty damned good most of the time, but Briggs now knew happiness wasn’t the sure thing he’d once thought it to be. You had to work at it, open yourself up, be ready to lose and to hurt, and never take anything for granted. In that respect, Elle’s death had been a positive for him.