Even as the chief spoke, a helicopter came in from the west and began slowly orbiting the area where they stood. It had a television station’s call letters on the side of it, and a big human eye.
The junior FBI man put his hand above the police chief’s right elbow and escorted him away.
“What have I forgotten, Jake?” Harley Merritt asked. He was a former college basketball player, about six feet five inches tall, and had hands like dinner plates. He had thought he wanted to be a lawyer, but the agency had recruited him because of his language skills. His management skills and bureaucratic smarts had taken him up the ladder.
“Who found him?” Jake asked.
“His daughter. About nine this morning. She was still in her robe. Saw the boat was still there, came down to the pier and saw his fishing gear, then saw the body floating.”
“Tough.”
Merritt sighed. “The FBI took her and the kids home. They sealed the house and are searching it now.”
He turned to the FBI special agent and spoke with a hint of apology in his voice. “I know you and your agency know how to investigate. I’m merely asking you to pull out all the stops. Do everything you can think of. I know you can’t prove a negative, but if there is anything … anything at all that doesn’t look right, that even hints that the director might have been assassinated, call me. Day or night.” He passed him a card. “My private cell is on there.”
“We should have preliminary results from the autopsy by Monday.”
“Call me, and have a courier deliver a hard copy to me at Langley.”
“Yes, sir.”
Harley Merritt stuck out his hand and the FBI agent shook it. Jake did likewise. Then the two CIA officers strolled away, up the lawn, passing a team of people carrying lights and scuba gear.
“If it wasn’t an accident,” Merritt mused, “and of course it probably was, then it was an inside or an outside job. What foreign power stands to gain something by Tomazic’s demise?”
“Damn if I know.” Jake Grafton was a retired two-star admiral, the current head of Middle Eastern ops for the agency. He was a lean six feet, with a nose a bit too large for his face, a square jaw and gray eyes. His thinning, graying hair was combed straight back. No one had ever called him handsome. Still, he had a presence. His wife thought it was a mix of competence and self-confidence. Whatever, he radiated a calm demeanor that seemingly couldn’t be shaken. That Harley Merritt had called and asked Grafton to come to meet him and the FBI here was testimony to the professional regard Merritt held for him, and Jake knew that.
“I want you to go back to the office,” Merritt told Grafton, “and get all the security codes to Tomazic’s office, desk, files and computer. The computer will have to be examined by the IT guys. You dig into the rest of it.”
Jake knew what Merritt wanted. If Tomazic had been murdered by someone in the CIA, Merritt wanted a trail. A trace. A sniff. Something.
“He was only with the Company about eighteen months,” Jake said.
“I know that. But maybe someone got scared. Frightened people do really stupid things.”
“Anything else?”
“Monday we’ll do a full-blown staff review of everything on our plate. I’ll alert the other department heads and the staff. Have them come in tomorrow and get after it.”
“If someone inside the Company murdered him, then everyone is suspect,” Grafton pointed out. “Did you check where I was at dawn this morning?”
Harley Merritt gave him his frozen stare. “We have to trust people, even in this business. Especially in this business. I trust two, you and me. If it turns out that you’re bent and I’m still above ground, I’ll kill you.”
A trace of a smile played on Jake Grafton’s features. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.
In front of the dead man’s house, Harley Merritt got into a bulletproof executive sedan, one trailed by a car containing a driver and two armed guards. Jake Grafton watched the two vehicles thread their way around all the police and FBI vehicles and turn left on the street.
Mario Tomazic normally rode around Washington in a guarded limo, too. But not on his getaway weekends. On those precious escapes he left the guards in Washington and drove his old pickup to the Eastern Shore. And there it sat, right in front of the garage door, getting a preliminary look from two FBI agents. A tow truck was backing down the driveway to hook it up. In Washington the pickup would get the full treatment and give up any secrets it had. If it had any.
Jake walked across the grass toward his own car, a five-year-old Honda. When he got the call from Merritt this morning, he had been at his weekend house in Rehoboth Beach. He pulled out his cell phone and called his wife.
“It’s already on the news, Jake,” Callie Grafton said when he told her the director was dead. “I was watching the story on TV. How very sad.”
“Yeah. Going fishing, then drowning right there by the pier.”
“So when will you get back to the beach?”
“Monday night, maybe. I’m going back to Washington. Gotta go to the office.”
“I have a class on Tuesday I have to be back for.” Callie was a linguist. This semester she was teaching a few classes of Chinese at Georgetown University, just to keep her hand in.
“Monday night. I’ll come get you then. We’ll eat dinner on the way back to Washington.”
Traffic on the Bay Bridge wasn’t bad Saturday afternoon. Most people were still trying to get out of the Washington metro area, not return to it.
As he drove, Jake Grafton thought about the vicissitudes of life. His career had given him an intimate acquaintance with violent death. He had seen a lot of it, combat, operational accidents, murders …
Was Mario Tomazic murdered? He didn’t have an opinion because he had no facts to base one on. The general was a good man. His family and colleagues were going to miss him. That’s more than many of us get.
That evening at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Jake Grafton turned over the director’s PC and laptop to the IT department, along with the registered access codes. Maybe they could get something out of those two devices; Jake certainly couldn’t, and he wasn’t going to waste time trying.
When he was again alone in the director’s office he opened the desk and filing cabinets. All were locked, of course, but he had the codes. The desk contained mostly office supplies: some pencils, paper clips, a stapler and a half-dozen pens with the general’s favorite color of ink: green. Some pocket change. A laundry receipt. A staple puller. And a pocketknife, a two-blade Schrade, old but sharp, made in the USA. That was the crop.
On the desk were pictures of the general’s deceased wife and his grown children with their families. Jake took the photos out of the frames, made sure there was nothing else there, no notes or telephone numbers or access codes, then put the frames and photos back together.
He tackled the file cabinets last. Got them open and started on the left-hand cabinet, reading every file, from the left side of the top drawer to the right. The files were all in red folders marked prominently TOP SECRET. Was there any other kind? When he finished with the top drawer, he moved down. At three in the morning he’d had all he could stand, so he crashed on the couch in his office. He got back to it about noon on Sunday, after he ate a sandwich at the cafeteria.
The files contained mostly political summaries. Problems in Egypt, South America, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria … the list went on and on. Europe was there, summaries and guesses and analysts’ notes. Current CIA operational files and notes were not in the director’s drawers. Conference notes and synopses of meetings with other federal agencies were. Tomazic had half a drawer devoted to the agency’s contacts with the Department of Homeland Security and another half drawer full of National Security Agency proposals, meeting minutes, notes and so on. Jake Grafton signed his name on the access sheet of every file he opened.