“The other side?”
“It’s not that simple. Could have been anyone from an al Qaeda groupie to some wild-ass green badger looking to make his name with a big hit. Or maybe just a local warlord looking to rub out a rival. Whoever it was, Castle’s dimes started rolling all over the floor, meaning he had to either track them down or shut down Mansur.”
“If he thought the targets were iffy, why keep calling in strikes?”
“Castle’s the only one who can answer that. But first you’d have to find him. And when you do, my old station chief would be much obliged if you’d let him in on the secret.”
“He’s missing? Even to the CIA?”
“Only for guys at my level. This kind of info gets compartmentalized beyond belief once a fuckup occurs. Especially when somebody’s name starts showing up on consultants’ enemies lists. Because you weren’t the only one who got burned by these mistakes.”
“IntelPro, you mean.”
“They’re one possibility. Tricorn Associates. Overton Security. Those are two more. Plus any sheep-dipped outfit of mercenaries you care to name. Just about any of them might have been hung out to dry if a beacon got misused.”
“So what’s the Agency saying — that he’s gone?”
“What, admit they’ve lost the handle on one of their top-level experts?” Bickell shook his head. “Besides, someone inside is bound to know where he is. Someone always does. You know anything about that fucked-up game they play over there, bushkazi?”
“The one on horseback, yeah.”
“Like polo for barbarians, except instead of a ball they’ve got a dead goat, with both sides trying to keep it. Sometimes the goat gets torn to shreds before either side wins. Well, right now, from what I hear, Castle’s the dead goat in a big game of Agency bushkazi. So good luck if you think you’re going to find him. The way this one’s going, you’ll be more likely to bump into Mullah Omar.”
“I wasn’t exactly expecting to run him down.”
“No, but you might find Mansur. A year ago, when things started to get a little hot for his family, he supposedly used some of his Agency winnings and consular contacts to buy his way out of Dodge. Got a one-way ticket to Europe and a Canadian visa.”
“So he’s in Canada now?”
“Was. Disappeared about a day after the Agency went looking for him. No trace for months, then he supposedly turned up down in Baltimore.”
Jesus, Cole thought. Was everyone in Baltimore?
“So they found him?”
“Tried to. Or had the Bureau try for them, jurisdictional rules and all that. No luck.”
“Well, if the FBI couldn’t find him—”
“Maybe they weren’t looking very hard.”
“Why, ’cause they hate the Agency? The whole rivalry thing?”
Bickell shook his head. “Cooperation’s better than ever on stuff like this. I’m betting my people made a decision at some point that they didn’t want to look very hard. Far better to hear that a cursory check showed no sign of him, so thanks for trying and call off the dogs until further notice, pretty please. Or maybe they found him but hushed it up. Put him under surveillance. By request, of course. Either way, it’s more cover-up, more stuff no one would talk about. Not when I asked, anyway.”
“Is that why they pushed you out? For asking about Mansur and Magic Dimes?”
“Plus some other shit. Even when Wade was still active there was all kinds of noise around the Agency’s Predator program, so I’d already been asking questions.”
“Noise?”
“Funny stuff nobody could or would explain. Not even Castle, and he was supposed to be running the show.”
“Like what?”
“People coming in and out of our ops center who I’d never seen before. They’d nod at Wade like they were buddies and he’d nod back.”
“Green badgers? Blue badgers?”
“No badgers. And no names, far as I could tell. I’d ask Wade and he’d say something about it being strictly need-to-know, so butt out, but I could tell he didn’t like ’em, either. So I averted my eyes, at least for a while. Then I asked the station chief. He told me to drop it, let Wade handle it. So I let Wade handle it, and Wade disappeared.” He shook his head, gazing out across the lake. “Tell me something, in all your ops did you ever get any unexplained visitors to your chat group?”
“You mean besides you guys?”
“Hell, we were OGA. Duly announced and reporting for duty. Might as well have been displaying an Agency icon every time we posted. No, I mean true interlopers, guys who might ask a question out of nowhere, with a handle you’d never seen before, then slink off into the ether.”
Cole thought about it. Drew a blank.
“Don’t recall any. Nobody beyond the usual crowd, from Al Udeid on down.”
“Nobody with the handle Lancer?”
The name stopped him, literally. He stood still on the path. A bird called out from overhead, and a droplet of melted snow smacked his forehead just as he locked on to a memory.
“Yeah, there was a Lancer. Just once. Or once that I can remember.” Bickell was intense now, staring straight at him. “It was during our recon at Sandar Khosh, the month before the missile strike.”
“Remember what he asked?”
“No. But I remember wondering who the hell it was, just for a second. His handle popped up, he asked one or two questions, then he vanished, just like you said. It happened so fast I didn’t think about it again. Until now.”
“I got him pretty regular. So did everybody in our shop. I asked Wade who the hell he was.”
“And?”
“Told me he was a privileged guest, nothing more. After that I always wondered if he was bird-dogging you guys as well. Your CO never mentioned him?”
“Nothing. Before or after.”
“Curious.”
“You think it’s related to all this stuff?”
“Hell, everything’s related. But how? No idea. Just another part of the noise.”
They walked on, footsteps crunching frosted mud in the shadows along the shoreline before they turned back into sunlight. Bickell looked up at the sky. A small private plane, a Cessna or a Piper, soared across the far side of the lake. They watched for a few seconds before it veered through a notch in the gray hills, leaving behind only the faint drone of its engine as it disappeared over the horizon.
During the pause another possibility occurred to Cole: Maybe this whole conversation was part of a setup, and the whole scene with the tape recorder had been for show. Bickell could be wired, transmitting the conversation to some guy in a van a few hundred yards away. Steve and he would then be intercepted before they could even make it to the end of the dirt road. But to what purpose? He couldn’t think of one, so he kept asking questions.
“This guy Mansur — why Baltimore?”
Bickell shrugged.
“I wondered, too. It’s not like there’s any Little Kabul down there, someplace where he might blend in. Only a handful of Afghans in the city, although one of them is a brother of Hamid Karzai, president of the fucking country. Owns a bunch of restaurants there.” Cole raised an eyebrow, but Bickell waved him off. “It was checked. No connection. Besides, that’s not exactly the low profile they wanted for Mansur. All I can figure is that there must be a sponsor nearby, somebody who helps keep an eye on him.”
“Like IntelPro?”
Bickell narrowed his eyes.
“What makes you keep mentioning them?”