Stearns nodded, staring blankly into the middle distance.
“He’s been looking into Harrison Sinclair’s death.”
He blinked a few times and said, “So?”
“He believes it had something to do with the KGB.”
He rubbed his eyes with both hands and moaned. “Old Cold Warriors don’t let go of their illusions very easily, do they? The KGB, and the Evil Empire, were truly great villains in their time. Really first-rate. But the KGB hasn’t existed for a few years now. And even when it did, they didn’t do things like assassinate directors of Central Intelligence.”
I considered showing him the photograph Ed Moore had given me, but just then the telephone buzzed.
“It’s Molly,” came Darlene’s voice, metallic and flat.
I punched the button, picked up immediately.
“Molly-” I began.
She was crying, her words slurred, almost indecipherable. “Ben… something awful…”
I rushed into the corridor, toward the elevator, easing my coat on as I ran. Past Bill Stearns, hunched in conversation with Jacobsen, a bright new associate. Stearns looked up, gave me a quick, piercing, knowing glance as I ran.
As if… almost as if he knew.
SIX
A thousand years ago, it seems, I went through six months of CIA basic training at the “Farm”-Camp Peary, Virginia-where I learned everything from how to make a brush pass to how to pilot a small plane to how to aim a pistol from a moving car. One of my trade-craft instructors casually remarked that we would be learning the spy’s black arts so thoroughly that they would in time be automatic, almost instinctual. No matter what might take us by surprise, even years later, our bodies would know how to react a split second before our brains. I didn’t believe it; after my years as an attorney, I felt sure, my instincts must surely have faded.
I parked the Acura, not in our space behind the building, but a block and a half away, on Commonwealth Avenue.
Why? Instinct, I suppose; the ingrained habits of my time in the field.
Molly had discovered something terribly upsetting, something she couldn’t talk about over the phone. That was all, but still…
I raced down the alley that ran behind our block of attached town houses, approaching our building’s back entrance, pausing at the door before taking out my key. Then, momentarily reassured, I entered and stole quietly up the dark, wooden back stairs.
Just the normal house noises. The ticking of heat coursing through pipes; the refrigerator cycling on; the whirring of countless mechanical objects that run our home.
Anxiously, my entire body tensed, I entered the long, narrow room that would someday be our library, but for the time being was barren. The floor-to-ceiling bookcases lay empty, the oil paint still not quite dry a day after it had been applied by Frank, the painter we’d hired.
I was about to cross over to the staircase and up to the bedroom when, in my peripheral vision, I noticed something.
Molly and I had stacked our books in this room, by subject, ready to put up on the shelves the moment they were dry. They stood in neat piles against one wall, covered with a clear plastic drop cloth. Next to them, also covered with a drop cloth, were the oak file drawers I had refinished a few years ago, filled with our personal files.
Someone had been through them.
They had been searched, expertly but noticeably. The drop cloths had been lifted and replaced incorrectly, so that now they were draped with the paint-bespattered surface inside, not outside.
I drew closer.
The books, still in orderly piles, were arranged differently. But nothing seemed to have been taken; the signed copy of Allen Dulles’s The Craft of Intelligence was still there. Upon yet closer inspection, I could see that our files were in an entirely different order, some index tabs facing the wrong way, Molly’s medical school files where my law school files had been, everything slightly askew.
Nothing seemed, at first glance at least, to be missing. Merely rifled.
I had been meant to see this.
Someone had been in the house, had looked through our belongings. Had deliberately replaced them wrongly. So that I would notice. As… what? a warning?
My heartbeat accelerating, I hastened up the stairs and found Molly in the bedroom, curled up fetuslike in the very center of our king-size bed. She was still wearing her work clothes, the sort of outfit she always wore to the hospital-a pleated gray skirt, a salmon cashmere sweater-but her hair, normally pulled back, was in disarray. I noticed she was wearing the gold cameo locket her father had given her. It had belonged to his mother, and had been passed down through generations of Sinclairs and Evanses. I think she believed it was lucky.
“Honey?”
I came closer. Her eye makeup was badly smudged; she had been crying for a long time.
I touched my hand to the back of her neck, which was damp and hot.
“What happened?” I asked. “What is it?”
Clutched to her breast was the manila envelope.
“Where did you get that?”
Shaking, her voice trembling, she could barely speak. “Your briefcase,” she said. “Where you keep the bills. I was looking for the phone bill this morning…”
With an awful sense of dread I remembered that I had switched briefcases at home earlier that morning. She opened her eyes, red-rimmed. “I got out of work a couple of hours early, thanks to Burton, and decided to just crash,” she said slowly, thickly. “I couldn’t sleep. Too wired. I… decided to pay some bills, and I couldn’t find the phone bill. I looked in your briefcase…”
The photograph that I was now holding was of Molly’s father, after his death.
I had tried to protect her as much as possible from the horrible details of her father’s death. So badly burned was Harrison Sinclair’s body that an open coffin was out of the question. In addition to the terrible mutilation caused by the explosion of the gas tank, his neck had been nearly severed (during the crash, the forensic pathologist explained to me). I saw no reason for Molly to see her father this way; both she and I preferred that she remember him the way he was when they were last together, hale and ebullient and strong. I remember weeping in the morgue in Washington, seeing what was left of my father-in-law. Molly certainly didn’t need to go through it.
But she insisted. She was a physician, she insisted; she had seen mutilation. Still, it’s different if it’s your own father; the sight had been, naturally, deeply traumatic. Mangled though her father’s body was, she had been able to identify it, pointing out the faded blue tattoo of a heart on his upper shoulder (which he’d gotten one drunken night in Honolulu during his service in World War II), his college class ring, the mole on his chin. And then she entirely fell apart.
The photograph Ed Moore had given me had been taken after Hal’s death but before the car crash. It was proof of his murder.
It was a neck-and-shoulders shot of Hal Sinclair, eyes wide and staring, as if fiery with indignation. His lips, abnormally pale, were slightly parted, as if he were about to speak.
But he was unquestionably dead.
Immediately beneath his jawline, reaching from ear to ear, was a large horrid gaping grin, from which protruded tissue of red and yellow.
Sinclair’s neck had been deftly sliced from left carotid to right carotid. I knew the procedure well; we had been taught to recognize it at a glance. The flesh wound was accomplished with one quick stroke, prompting a sudden loss of arterial blood pressure in the brain.
To the victim it was as if someone had suddenly shut off the water. You collapsed almost instantly.
They had done this; they had murdered Hal Sinclair, they had for some unfathomable reason snapped a photo, and then they had put him in a car, and…