«It was false, Captain. She was working for us.»
«You’re out of your mind—I don’t believe you!»
«Read our file… As I piece it together, so your hands would appear clean, you passed another lie that happened to be the truth, a fatal truth. You sent word through a selected asset with KGB internals that Mrs. Hawthorne was a double agent, that her marriage was real, not a ceremony of convenience, as the Soviets believed it was. They eliminated her and dumped her body in the Heren Canal. We lost an extraordinary penetration and Hawthorne lost a wife.»
«Oh, my God!» Stevens writhed in his chair, his body jerking nervously back and forth between the arms. «Why the hell didn’t anyone tell us?» Then abruptly, he stopped, his eyes riveted on the director. «Wait a minute! If what you say is true, why didn’t she ever tell Hawthorne?»
«We can only speculate. They were in the same business; she knew about him, but he didn’t know about her. If he had, he would have forced her to stop, obviously knowing the risks.»
«How could she not tell him?»
«Scandinavian sangfroid, perhaps. Watch their tennis players. She couldn’t stop, you see. Her father died in a Siberian gulag as an anti-Soviet activist captured in Riga when she was quite young. She changed her name, built her own dossier, learned fluent Russian as well as French and English, and went to work for us in The Hague.»
«We had none of that in our records!»
«You could have had it if you’d picked up a telephone before making decisions. She was logged out of the system.»
«Bullshit! Who the hell can trust anybody?»
«Maybe that’s why I’m here, young man,» said Gillette, his narrow, flesh-encased eyes conveying equal parts contempt and understanding. «I’m a pretty old geezer out of G-2, Vietnam, where things were really screwed up, so messy that I emerged with a terrific reputation that I didn’t deserve—to the contrary, I probably should have been court-martialed. So I know where you’re coming from, Captain, which doesn’t excuse you or me, but I think you should know the truth.»
«If you felt that way, why did you take this job?»
«You called me a civilian, and you’re right on the mark, a very rich civilian. I made a great deal of money, in part due to that undeserved reputation, so when I was tapped for this job, I decided it was payback time. I’d like to try to make things a little better in this very necessary area of the government … to make up for past mistakes, maybe.»
«Considering your mistakes, what made you think you’re qualified?»
«Because of those mistakes. We’re so panic-prone over secrets, we all too frequently fail to communicate essentials—or seek them out. For instance, I don’t think you’ll repeat the error of Ingrid Hawthorne.»
«It wasn’t my error! You just said it: She wasn’t logged in the system!»
«Neither are eighty to a hundred others, what do you think of that?»
«I think it smells!»
«Including several dozen assets of your own.»
«That was before I came on board,» said the naval officer curtly. «A system doesn’t work if it’s disregarded. There are fail-safe procedures in those computers.»
«Don’t tell that to the hackers who broke into the Pentagon machines. They might not believe you.»
«One in a million chances!»
«Roughly the same as a specific sperm fertilizing an egg, yet nine months later a life is there. And you took one of those lives, Captain.»
«Goddamn you—»
«Spare me,» said the CIA director, holding up his hands, his elbows on the arms of the chair. «That information remains in the confines of this room. For your edification, I made a similar mistake on the Ho Chi Minh trail—and that, too, will remain in this room.»
«Are we finished?»
«Not yet. I can’t order you, but I’d suggest you reach Hawthorne and give him whatever oceangoing help he needs. You’re all over the Caribbean, and we’re stretched thin down there.»
«He won’t talk to me,» said the captain slowly, quietly. «I tried several times. As soon as he realized who it was, he hung up without a word.»
«He’s talked to someone on your staff, MI-6 confirmed it. He told their man, Cooke, in Virgin Gorda, that Hawthorne knew about the Bajaratt woman, that the Oval Office was under max-security, the President in a jacket. If you didn’t tell him, who did?»
«I put it up for grabs,» replied Stevens reluctantly. «After I couldn’t get anywhere with that bastard, I told a few men who knew him that if anyone felt he could make any progress with him, to go ahead and give Tye the scenario.»
«Tye?»
«We knew each other, not well, but we’d have drinks now and then. My wife worked at the embassy in Amsterdam; they were friends.»
«He suspected you in his wife’s murder?»
«Hell, I showed him the photographs but swore we had nothing to do with her death—which actually we didn’t.»
«But you did.»
«There’s no way he could have known that; besides, the Soviets left their mark as a warning to others.»
«But we all develop instincts, don’t we?»
«What do you want from me, Mr. Director? I’m out of conversation.»
«Since the British recruited him, hold an immediate staff meeting and figure out what you can do to help.» The DCI leaned over his desk and wrote on a memo pad. «Coordinate with MI-6 and the Deuxième; here are the two men you should contact, and only them and only on scrambler.» The director held out the paper.
«Right to the top,» remarked the officer from naval intelligence, reading the names. «What’s the code?»
«Little Girl Blood. That’s when you go on scrambler.»
«You know,» said Stevens, getting up from the chair and putting the note in his pocket, «I have an idea that we all may really be overreacting. We’ve lived through dozens of alerts like this—hit teams being sent out from the Middle East, psychos waiting to take a shot at the big man in airports, nuts rounded up who’ve written crazy letters—and ninety-nine percent of the time they turned out to be vapors. Suddenly, a lone woman traveling with a kid shows up on our subcellar screens, and the alarms rattle cages from Jerusalem to D.C. with loud bells in Paris and London. Doesn’t that strike you as a little heavy?»
«How thoroughly did you read the information I got from London and forwarded to you?» asked the DCI.
«Very. She’s a psychotic for all the reasons the Freudians expound on, and, without doubt, obsession-oriented. That doesn’t make her super Amazon.»
«Because she isn’t. A larger-than-life subject is an easier target; he or she stands out. Bajaratt could be the girl next door in Centerville, U.S.A., or the vacuous fashion model on Paris’s Saint-Honoré, or a shy sabra private in the Israeli Army. She doesn’t lead charges, Captain, she orchestrates them, that’s her genius. She creates events, then moves the principals within them toward the predetermined objectives. If she were an American and of a different mentality, she’d probably be sitting where I am.»
«May I ask …?» The naval officer shifted his feet, breathing deeply, his face growing red as the blood rose to his head. «What I did—oh, God, what I did—you said it would remain in this room.»
«It will.»
«Christ, why did I do it?» The officer’s eyes were clouded as his body shook. «I killed Tye’s wife …!»
«It’s over, Captain Stevens. Unfortunately, you’ll live with it for the rest of your life—as I have for over thirty years since the Ho Chi Minh. That’s our punishment.»
Tyrell’s brother, Marc Anthony Hawthorne—«Marc-Boy» in the Caribbean’s lingua franca—had flown to Virgin Gorda to take over his sibling’s charter. Marc Hawthorne was in several respects the eternal younger brother, slightly taller than the tall Tyrell, quite a bit more slender—very thin to be precise—and with a face similar in appearance but without the crow’s-feet or the neutral eyes of his older, more experienced brother. He was seven years younger, and although it was apparent that he held the first Hawthorne son in great affection, it was also obvious that he frequently questioned his brother’s intellect.