CHAPTER FOUR
The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.
CIA Director Mario Tomazic liked to spend his free weekends at a cottage on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, on a waterfront lot beside the wide mouth of a river estuary. He didn’t have many free weekends; he was lucky to get one or two a month, but when he could arrange to get away this was where he came. He found fishing relaxing, and with his little runabout he could motor out and fish and drink beer and sit in the sun and look at the sky and clouds and recharge his batteries for the week ahead. He needed those weekends. Badly. They were especially sweet when his daughter and her kids came; he got a chance to play grandfather and teach the kids how to fish.
On the downside, there was the Friday afternoon traffic eastbound across the Bay Bridge, and Sunday evening it was a very slow go westbound. The Bay Bridge funnel was just something he had to live with, one of those things you can’t do anything about.
If he hadn’t bought this place years ago for a very modest sum when he was a colonel, he wouldn’t buy it now. It was too difficult to get to on those rare free weekends and would be too expensive. His wife had loved the cottage by the water. Loved to birdwatch and do her watercolors, many of which decorated his office at Langley and his condo in town. She had died of cancer some years back. Still, he saw her presence everywhere at the cottage on the shore, the little house with a lawn that ran down to the water’s edge and a small pier where water lapped nervously.
Tomazic was a retired army four-star, a “terrorism” expert according to the press, and that so-called credential and his record in Iraq had gotten him nominated for the CIA job by the president. He hadn’t wanted the job, but when the powers that be wanted him for something important that needed to be done, he didn’t have it in him to refuse. The military does that to you. Regardless of your personal desires, when the boss gives you a task you say “Yes, sir” and do it to the very best of your ability. That attitude becomes ingrained.
He was up at dawn this October Saturday morning. His daughter and the kids were still asleep, and would be for several hours. He’d had had a nice visit with them last night when they arrived, and now they were sleeping late. Tomazic couldn’t have slept past 5 A.M. if his life depended upon it. Hadn’t done so in forty years.
He drank a cup of coffee and watched the dawn peep through high clouds. A little wind, but not much. He ate a protein bar for breakfast, got his fishing rod and tackle box, then slipped out of the house and pulled the door shut behind him. Walked across the lawn the seventy-five feet to the pier.
God, it was a beautiful morning!
His boat was a sixteen-foot aluminum thing with a tiny outboard motor, one he wouldn’t use this morning. He would just row out into the river a bit and drift down to where it emptied into the bay. That lightly churning water was a good place to find hungry fish.
Mario Tomazic checked the boat out, saw that it had ridden well since he put it in the water and got it ready to go yesterday evening. He loosened up the lines, put his gear on the dock where he could reach it and started to step aboard.
He never made it. The boat shot sideways away from the dock about a foot, to the limits of the ropes holding it. Something grabbed an ankle and he was pulled into the water between the boat and the pier. Tomazic whacked his head on the side of the boat as he fell in.
Woozy, shocked and confused, he found himself being dragged under the water by two strong hands.
Tomazic immediately began struggling. The hands shifted. One was on an arm and the other was on his back, pushing him down. Tomazic twisted, saw a faceplate in the murky water. A scuba diver! His free fist shot out and hit the plate, shattering it.
The hands were ruthless. They spun him and pushed him face-first deeper into the water, almost to the muddy bottom.
He couldn’t breathe! Couldn’t get a grip — couldn’t get free. He struggled with all the strength of a drowning man, which he was, as the panic and terror swept through him … to no avail.
It was all over in less than half a minute. Involuntarily Mario Tomazic tried to breathe, which filled his lungs with water.
When he stopped struggling, the diver held him under another minute, just to make sure, then released the body. He checked his wrist compass, then swam away underwater.
It was four in the afternoon when Jake Grafton joined the deputy director of the CIA, Harley Merritt, two very senior FBI agents, and the chief of the county police on Tomazic’s pier. The driveway was jammed with police and FBI cars, plus a mobile crime lab in a panel truck.
Tomazic’s body was long gone.
“It looks as if he was trying to get into the boat and slipped,” the senior FBI agent said. “Whacked his head on the gunnel there — you can see the blood — and then drowned right between the boat and the pier.”
“A freak accident,” the county mountie said hopefully.
Jake Grafton stood surveying the estuary, the other piers along the shores with their boats, and the houses he could see between the trees. Not even a trace of traffic noise. Some people stood in their yards across the placid brown river looking at the commotion over here. Still, this was a calm, peaceful place this Saturday afternoon. Where death had just visited.
“We’ve interviewed people in all the houses on both sides of this waterway,” one of the FBI men said. “No one saw anything. Had to have happened early, like a little after dawn. The director was obviously going fishing. His pole and tackle box are still here on the pier.”
“Any other boats anchored around here this morning?” Jake asked, still scanning the shorelines.
“Some out in the bay, but they left early. Long before we got here.”
“An accident,” the police chief said, almost like a prayer. He was about seventy pounds overweight and cinched his gunbelt tightly under his gut. The marvel was that the gunbelt stayed in place.
“I want to be damn sure,” Harley Merritt said. “I want any satellite imagery of this place we can find for study. And I want a lockdown on all these houses on both sides of the river until we can interview everyone in each and every house — everyone. The police can help with that. Then I want complete bios done on each and every one of these people. Anyone who has left the area is to be tracked down and interviewed. I want to know who all these people are, why they are here, the whole enchilada. And FBI—”
“We know how to do an investigation, Mr. Merritt.” The FBI senior man was a bit testy.
“I know you do. But this is a national security investigation, not a bank robbery. I want you to seal off this area right here and send down divers. I want them to sift the mud. I want anything and everything there is to be had around here.”
“Jesus Christ!” the police chief said. “I know this guy was a big spook dude, but … Hell, people drown somewhere on the edge of this bay nearly every weekend, some weekends two or three of them. Get tight as ticks and—”
“And I want to keep this out of the press until Monday,” Merritt said. “We’ll make an announcement then.”
“You gotta be shittin’ me!” the local cop said disgustedly. “The ambulance crew has already put the guy’s name on the air. It’s out there, man.”
Merritt seemed to take that with good grace. He did glance at Grafton, who was deadpan.
“Thanks, Chief, for all your help. We’ll need more of it the next few days.”
“If the county has to pay overtime, we’ll send you a bill.”