“They didn’t find the bioweapons labs. What makes you think they found the cache?”
“Because the weapons never existed. Nor was there any heroin. And you didn’t fuck my wife.”
“Ah, but I did. She had a small mole on her left thigh, just below her pussy. Remember?”
Wager leaned back against the desk for support, and he tried to hide his effort to reach the phone, but the Cynic pulled him away, a broad smile on his bloody lips. Even his teeth were red, and Wager thought that a bit of flesh was hanging from the side of the man’s mouth.
“The password, please.”
“I don’t have it,” Wager said, and it came to him that the Cynic wasn’t lying: he had fucked Sandee. But then, in those days, everybody was fucking everybody else. Wives, girlfriends, sisters, even mothers. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the moment. It was the game from the get-go, so the stories went. From the beginning of the Agency, and even before that in the WWII OSS. Fucking was not only the ultimate aphrodisiac; it was a powerful tool.
Wager thought that the happiest time of his entire life had been during training at the CIA’s base on Camp Peary in Virginia — south of DC. It was called the Farm because it grew agents. They were young and naive. Anxious for the future, but dedicated. “Truth, justice, and the American way,” a former DCI had supposedly once said. They were supermen and women. It was where he had first met Sandee, who was two years older than he was. But they’d been a natural pair from the beginning, though at first he’d thought she’d been working him, been given him as an assignment. But then he fell in love — and he’d always thought she had too — and nothing else mattered.
“Too bad for you,” the Cynic said. “But there are others.”
Wager started to shake his head, if for nothing else but to ward off what he knew was coming next. But it didn’t help.
Grinning like a madman, the Cynic took Wager into his arms and began to eat his face, starting at the nose, powerful teeth shredding flesh and cartilage.
TWO
Marty Bambridge, the CIA’s deputy director of operations, was awakened by his wife, who kept pushing at his shoulder. He was in a foul mood: too much red wine last night at dinner, from which nothing was left but a son-of-a-bitch headache and a crappy taste in his mouth. Along with that was the rumor floating around campus that the DCI Walt Page was on his way out, and there was talk of a clean sweep. All the old brass was going with him.
Which meant the heads of each directorate — intelligence, science and technology, management and services, and operations, formerly the directorate of national clandestine service.
Bambridge was a spy master, a job he knew he’d been meant for, when as a kid studying law and foreign relations at the University of Minnesota he’d read and reread every espionage novel he could get his hands on — especially the James Bond stories. But never in his dreams in those days did he believe he would actually get to run the CIA’s spies.
If it was actually coming to an end for him, he had no earthly idea what he would do with himself. He was helpless and frightened, which made him angry.
He growled at his wife. “What?”
“Phone,” she mumbled. She handed it to him, then rolled over and went back to sleep.
“Bambridge,” he said, sitting up.
“This is Bob Blankenship, campus security, sir. We have a problem.”
“Write me a memo, for Christ’s sake. I’ll deal with it in the morning.”
“No, sir. Mr. Page has been informed, and he specifically wants you involved. There’s been a murder here on the third floor of the OHB. One of your people. A former field officer.”
Bambridge was suddenly wide-awake. He turned on the nightstand light. It was after 1 A.M. “Who is it?”
“The security pass we found on the body identified him as Walter Wager. He worked as a mid-level operational planner on your staff.”
“I know him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You said murder? How?”
“I think it would be best if you came in and took a look yourself. Mr. Page did not want the authorities notified before you had a chance to get here. Nor are we moving the body.”
“Shit, shit,” Bambridge said under his breath. “Any witnesses?”
“He was alone on the floor.”
“Surveillance videos?”
“No, sir.”
“God damn it. One of the cameras in the corridor must have picked up something.”
“They were disabled.”
“Who the hell was monitoring?”
“A loop was inserted into the recording unit for the entire floor. Shows the same images over and over.”
Bambridge tried to think of some reason he wouldn’t have to go out. At forty-three, he had become soft. He’d never actually served as a field officer, though he did two five-year stints as assistant to the chief of station, one in Ottawa and the other in Canberra, neither them hot spots under any stretch of the imagination. He’d never humped his butt in Iraq or Afghanistan like many of the officers who’d worked for him had, so he’d never formed a bond — especially not with the NOCs who he’d always considered to be prima donnas. Just like Wager.
“Turn out the light,” his wife said.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he told the security officer. “Touch nothing.”
He got up and flipped on the lights in the bathroom and the closet. His wife buried her head deeper into the covers. If she had been a thoughtful woman, Marty mused, she would have gotten up and had the coffee on by now.
It was just one more brick in his wall of frustration and anger.
They had a nice two-story colonial on Davis Street NW near the Naval Observatory, and Bambridge had crossed the Key Bridge and was heading north on the GW Parkway to Langley before one thirty. Traffic was very light, the October morning cool, even crisp after a steamy summer, but he felt a heaviness in his chest he’d never felt before. And he was a little worried. His wife sometimes called him a hypochondriac, but over the past few months, and especially this morning, he’d seriously begun to get concerned he was developing heart troubles. It was the stress of the job, he told himself. Lately the stress of losing his job. And just now a murder inside the CIA’s campus. It was unbelievable, and the only other word he could think of was incompetence. Heads would roll, he would make sure of it.
The security officers at the main gate looked up as Bambridge’s BMW breezed through the employee lane; a bar code in the windshield along with a photograph of the driver’s face recognized the car and the DDO even before the rear bumper cleared.
Up at the OHB, which was the first of several buildings on campus, Bambridge’s bar code allowed him access to the underground VIP parking garage, and three minutes later he was getting off the elevator on the third floor — having passed his badge through the security reader in the basement and submitted to a retinal scan.
Bambridge was a narrow, slope-shouldered man whose acquaintances described him as almost always surprised, but whose friends described him as seriously intent. His features were dark; some French Canadian blood a couple of generations ago, according to his mother, who still lived in northern Minnesota. He harbored the more romantic notion that a Sicilian had gotten in there somewhere, which gave him a penchant for mysteriousness and a touch of violence.
Blankenship, a much taller, broader man in his early fifties, who wore a ridiculous military buzz cut, had been notified of the DDO’s arrival and was waiting for him.
“I hope you haven’t had breakfast yet, sir,” he said.
“No. Let’s get this over with so I can.”