They.
I knew right away, of course, who they were.
In the trade, this was what is known as a “signature,” or “fingerprint,” killing, a type of murder preferred by a particular group or organization.
The carotid-to-carotid slice was a specialty of the former East German intelligence service, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, also known as the Staatssicherheitsdienst.
The Stasi.
That manner of execution was their signature, and this photograph was their calling card.
But it was the calling card of an intelligence service that no longer existed.
SEVEN
She wept silently, her shoulders shaking, and I held her. I kissed the nape of her neck, speaking softly.
“Molly, I’m sorry you had to see this.”
She grabbed a pillow with both fists, scrunched it up into her face, muffling her words. “It’s a nightmare. What they did to him.”
“Whoever did it, Mol, they’ll catch them. They almost always do. I know that’s no consolation.” I didn’t believe it either, but Molly needed to hear the words. I didn’t tell her my suspicions about how the house had been searched.
Now she turned over, her eyes searching my face. My heart squeezed. “Who would do this, Ben? Who?”
“Everyone in public office is vulnerable to crazy people. Especially in a position as sensitive as Director of CIA.”
“But… it means Dad was killed first, doesn’t it?”
“Molly, you talked to him the morning he was killed.”
She sniffled, reached for a tissue, squeezed her nose with it. “That morning,” she said.
“You said there was nothing unusual in your conversation.”
She shook her head. “I remember,” she said remotely, “he was complaining about some intra-Agency power struggle he couldn’t explain much about. But that’s normal for him. He always felt CIA was an impossible agency to get under control. I think he just wanted to vent, but as usual, he couldn’t say anything specific.”
“Go on.”
“Well, that’s pretty much it. He sighed, said-no, that’s right, he sang, ‘Fools rush in where wise men never go.’ In his lousy voice.”
“That’s a Sinatra song, right?”
She nodded once, compressed her lips. “His favorite. Hated the man, loved the music. Not exactly a profound sentiment. Anyway, he always sang that to me at bedtime when I was little.”
I got up from the bed, went to the mirror, and straightened my tie.
“Back to the office, Ben?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know. So am I, a little bit. Call me again. Whenever you want.”
“You’re going to sign on with Alex Truslow, aren’t you?”
I tugged at my lapels, ran a comb through my hair, didn’t answer. “I’ll talk to you later,” I said.
She looked at me oddly, as if trying to decide something, and at last said: “How come you never talk about Laura?”
“I’m not-” I began.
“No. Listen to me. I know it’s so painful to you it’s unbearable. I know that. I don’t want to dredge up anything like that, believe me. But given what happened to Dad… Well, Ben, I just want to know if your decision to work with Truslow has something to do with how Laura was killed, with some kind of attempt to rectify things or something-”
“Molly,” I said very quietly, warningly. “Don’t.”
“All right,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
She was on to something, of course, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time.
I found myself thinking quite a bit about Harrison Sinclair that day. One of my earliest memories of him was of his telling a dirty joke.
He was a tall, spare, elegant man with a full head of white hair, obviously a former athlete. (He had rowed crew at Amherst.) Hal Sinclair was an easy, charming man, at once dignified and playful.
At the time I was in college, one of only three Harvard students (and the only undergraduate) in an MIT seminar on nuclear weapons. One Monday morning I entered the seminar room and saw that we had a visitor, a tall, well-dressed older man. He sat there at the coffin-shaped conference table, listening and saying nothing. I figured (accurately) that he was a friend of the professor’s. Only much later did I learn that Hal, who was then the number-three man in CIA, the Director of Operations, was in Boston coordinating an espionage operation behind what used to be called the Iron Curtain involving MIT faculty members.
I happened that afternoon to be presenting a research paper I’d done on the fallacy of America’s nuclear weapons policy of mutual assured destruction, or MAD. It was a pretty sophomoric effort, I recall. The last line of the paper said something dumb about MAD being “MADness indeed.” Actually, I’m being unfair to myself; the paper was a pretty decent job of culling public sources on Soviet and American nuclear strategy.
Afterward, the distinguished-looking visitor introduced himself, shook my hand, told me how impressed he was. We stood around talking, and the man told an off-color but very funny joke about nuclear weapons, of all things. Then I noticed my friend Molly Sinclair come in the classroom door. We said hello, surprised to see each other outside of Harvard Yard.
Hal took the two of us out to lunch at Maison Robert, on School Street, in Old City Hall. (Molly and I have dined there exactly once since then, when I proposed to her; her reply was that she’d “think about it.”) There was a lot of booze, a lot of laughing. Hal told another off-color joke, and Molly blushed.
“You two should get together,” he said sotto voce to Molly, but not sotto enough that I didn’t overhear. “He’s great.”
She blushed redder still, almost scarlet.
We were both obviously attracted to each other, but it wasn’t to be for several years.
“It’s good to see you again,” Alexander Truslow said. He, Bill Stearns, and I sat at a banquette at the Ritz-Carlton the next day. “But I must confess: I’m a bit surprised. When we met at Hal’s funeral, I distinctly sensed a lack of interest on your part.”
Truslow was wearing another elegant bespoke suit, rumpled as usual. The only rakish element was his bow tie, which was small, neat, navy blue, and awkwardly tied. I was wearing my best suit, a muted olive-gray glen check from the Andover Shop in Harvard Square; I suppose I wanted to impress the old fellow.
He fixed me with a mournful look as he buttered his fresh-baked roll.
“I assume you know about my brief intelligence career,” I said.
He nodded. “Bill has briefed me. I understand there was a tragedy. And that you were completely exonerated.”
“So I’m told, yes,” I murmured.
“But it was a scarring, terrible time.”
“It was a time I don’t much talk about,” I said.
“I’m sorry. It’s the reason you quit the Company, isn’t that right?”
“It’s the reason,” I corrected him, “I quit that entire line of work. For good. I made a solemn vow to my wife.”
He put down his buttered roll without taking a bite. “And to yourself.”
“That’s right.”
“Then we must speak frankly. Are you at all familiar with what my firm does?”
“Vaguely,” I said.
“Well, we’re an international consulting firm. I guess that’s the best way to put it. One of our clients, as I’m sure you know, is-your former employer.”
“Which badly needs consulting,” I said.
Truslow shrugged, smiled. “No doubt. You understand I’m speaking now within the bounds of attorney-client privilege.”
I nodded, and he continued. “For various reasons, they at times desire the help of an outside firm located well outside the Beltway. For whatever reason-maybe because I was with the Agency so long, I was almost part of the furniture-the powers that be at Langley trust me to do the odd job for them.”