In the eyes of the intelligence community, Division had been castrated. Word went out that it was only a matter of time until it was shuttered altogether. In the meantime, Division needed an interim director. And this time he would not come from the ranks of the military.
Frank Connor fit the bill perfectly. He was not a professional soldier. In fact, he had never worn his country’s uniform. The closest he’d ever come to firing a weapon was blowing off an M-80 firecracker on the Fourth of July when he was a teenager. But, make no mistake, he was a fighter. Thirty years of toiling in the darkest corners of the Washington bureaucracy had honed survival skills a combat-hardened vet would envy. He’d worked at State, Treasury, and the Office of Management and Budget. He knew where the bodies were buried in every building in D.C. But for the past ten years he’d been a regular face inside the E-Ring of the Pentagon. He’d been at Division since the beginning.
Connor was the dumpy guy sitting in the corner with the wrinkled shirt and sweat rings under his arms who made sure all the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed. When Division needed a plane to ferry a team from friendly Kazakhstan into unfriendly Chechnya, Connor knew that only a Pilatus P-3 would do, and promptly made the arrangements. If an operative in Seoul required a dummy passport to cross into China, Connor could obtain one within twenty-four hours. (And you could be sure that it was clean, meaning that the number was duly registered in its home country and it would never raise a flag.) Need to bribe a corrupt dignitary? Connor would call an obliging banker at one of a dozen tax havens around the globe and the transaction would be taken care of. A shipment of Kalashnikovs to forces friendly to the cause in Colombia? Connor had the number of every arms dealer in both hemispheres memorized, and he probably knew their birthdays, too. The word was that Frank Connor made things happen. Quickly. Efficiently. And, best of all, secretly.
But equally important to his overseers at the Pentagon was what Connor didn’t do. He didn’t plan. He didn’t intrigue. And he didn’t dream. One look at his sagging cheeks, pouchy eyes, and lopsided gait, and you knew he was an inside man. Which was exactly what everyone wanted. An inside man to keep Division running until it could die a secret, clandestine death.
And Frank Connor wouldn’t have disagreed. At least, not out loud. But Connor had his own ideas about the disgraced agency’s future, and nowhere did they include a premature death. Despite the disaster in Switzerland, he was still a believer. And contrary to what his better-dressed, better-coifed, and better-informed bosses thought, Frank Connor did dream. He did intrigue. And he did plan. To his mind, Division was not dead. It was only resting. Gathering strength while waiting for a chance to reclaim its former glory.
Frank Connor’s chance.
His days as an inside man were over.
“Did you get the information on the medical conference he’s supposedly attending?” he asked.
“They’ve posted a website on the Net,” said Erskine. “I downloaded the essentials. Take a look.”
Connor studied the cover sheet. “International Association of Internists-21st Annual Congress. What’s so important about a conference that it lures Ransom away from his beloved field hospital?”
“He’s a keynote speaker. He’s set to deliver a speech tomorrow morning.”
Connor found the schedule of events. “‘Treatment of Parasitic Diseases in Pediatric Patients.’ I think I’ll take a pass. Where’d they say he’s staying?”
“Dorchester Hotel.”
“Not bad,” said Connor, raising an eyebrow as he flipped through the pages. “How many men do we have over there?”
“In London? Four, but one of them is on leave.”
“Four? You’re kidding me.” Connor shook his head. London was the intelligence capital of Europe. A year ago, Division had boasted posh offices alongside the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, with a staff of twenty full-time professionals and another twenty contract men on call. “Get that sonofabitch on leave back, and I mean now. Set up a twelve-hour rotation at Ransom’s hotel. Two men on, two men off. I want them on site and reporting back within the hour. And see what you can do about scaring up some more manpower. Get in touch with Berlin or Milan. They’ve got to have someone.”
“Sure thing.” Peter Erskine was thirty, pale, and runner lean, with black hair kept in place by a fistful of gel and shifty blue eyes that didn’t miss a thing. He was third-generation spook. Deerfield, Yale, a Fulbright scholar, and a Bonesman to boot. His grandfather had worked with Allen Dulles in Switzerland during the Second World War and his father had been George H. W Bush’s deputy director of operations when “Forty-one” had occupied the director’s chair at Langley in the mid-seventies. Erskine was the silk to Connor’s sandpaper. The glimpse of ermine to reassure visiting dignitaries from the Hill that Division could be trusted.
Connor dropped the papers on the desk. “So he comes all the way from deepest, darkest Africa just to deliver a speech about tropical parasites to a bunch of wealthy doctors. I don’t buy it. He must know that we’re keeping an eye on him. She’d have warned him of that. Why would he compromise himself? He’s there for another reason.”
“I checked with the conference organizers,” said Erskine. “Ransom was invited three months ago. They’re paying his plane fare and his hotel expenses.”
“No,” said Connor, crossing his arms over his barrel chest and glaring at his deputy. “It’s her.”
There was no need to mention a name. “Her” was Emma Ransom.
Connor walked to the window. Division’s offices had been moved to a nondescript office building in Tysons Corner, an “edge city” complex 15 miles southeast of Washington. It shared the building with the IRS and the Bureau of Weights and Measures. From his perch on the second floor, he looked across a forlorn stretch of Virginian asphalt and an auto repair shop. It wasn’t exactly the Lincoln Memorial and the Reflecting Pool.
“She’s there, Pete. It wasn’t his idea to go to some highfalutin conference in London. He hates that kind of thing. It was Emma’s doing.”
“With all due respect, sir, I can understand her wanting to see her husband, but why would she choose London? It’s the most heavily watched city on earth. They have over fifty thousand closed-circuit television cameras set up around the city, and those are just the ones belonging to the government. The average Joe gets his picture taken fifty times just walking along Oxford Street. It’d be like going into a shark tank with a bloody nose.”
“Sounds just like her,” said Connor.
It was Emma Ransom who’d blown the operation in Switzerland and all but brought down Division. She figured number one on Connor’s list of VIPs. There would be no going forward for Division or for Frank Connor until she was taken care of.