“The priest knew the man. His name was Domingo Cabrera and he works for the Cuban Department of the Interior—their DGI, the Secret Police.”
“Cabrera,” said Spada, frowning. He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. “Why do I know that name?”
Brennan whisked some ash off the front of his shirt and down onto the seventeenth-century Anatolian Lotto rug that covered the cardinal’s floor. “Because he is a close companion of Colonel John Holliday, whose path has crossed ours on several occasions. He cost us Pesek, the assassin, last winter and we lost any chance of ever finding the Book because of his antics in the Kremlin. He cost us Harris in Africa the year before that and he also knows far too much about the death of the present Holy Father’s predecessor and our possible involvement in that ‘arrangement.’”
Spada laid his hands flat on the table. The liver-colored age spots were everywhere now and the veins stood out like thick wormlike cables. The skin was so thin it looked like parchment, and unless he concentrated he could no longer stop the faint, tremulous shaking. It was the very earliest stage of Parkinson’s disease, but according to the doctors, at his age the symptoms, especially the cognitive ones, would progress rapidly. He sometimes wondered why he cared so much about living and had finally concluded that it was because he was so terrified of what faced him, or did not face him, after death. He frowned. Best not to think of such things.
Carrie Pilkington had done the New York Times crossword puzzle that morning in six minutes and fifteen seconds. Forty-five seconds longer than the all-time world’s record but pretty good all the same, especially for a twenty-seven-year-old, fresh out of Harvard with a postgraduate degree in ethnomusicology, making her the youngest doctor of anything in the Central Intelligence Agency.
She still wasn’t sure quite how or why she’d been recruited by the Company except that a mysterious man smoking a pipe had approached her at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament two years ago shortly after she’d taken second place. He’d asked her if the Harvard sweatshirt was real and when she said yes he’d given her his card and wandered away into the crowd, never to be seen again.
Initially she’d gone to the recruiting seminar simply out of curiosity, but after she’d listened to the speech and gotten the booklet describing pay grades and benefits, it occurred to her that her doctorate in ethnomusicology wouldn’t give her that kind of package in a university for years and it was also beginning to look as though her best bet for employment these days was probably going to be more on the level of high school band teacher somewhere in Missouri.
She applied, was accepted and went through an orientation course that did not involve guns, knives or twenty different ways to kill someone with a soupspoon. Now here she was, manning the Netherlands desk after Bert Coptic’s unfortunate and unforeseen massive coronary “event” that left his wife to collect his pension and about three dozen hidden Snickers bar wrappers in his bottom drawer.
The Netherlands desk was hardly the beating heart of intelligence in the agency and was just about as low as you could get on the hierarchical bureaucratic ladder, but Carrie didn’t mind; over her six months on the desk she’d noticed that Holland, and Amsterdam-Rotterdam in particular, was something of a minor crossroads in the game, like the intersection of a “Down” and an “Across” clue in a puzzle. And there was nothing Carrie Pilkington liked better than a puzzle except for that singular moment when all the pieces fit together to form a complete picture.
As intelligence analysis went, the young Miss Pilkington’s methods were seen as a little odd by most of her colleagues in the Western European Section on the third floor of the aging building in MacLean, Virginia. Carrie’s clues were gathered one by one and written cryptically on yellow Post-its in her own personal code and then stuck up on the gray metal wall of her cubicle. While other analysts pored over computers, flipped through dossiers and clipped newspapers, Carrie gathered Post-its and stared until she had enough of the little yellow squares to give her the picture on the cover of the box.
Like now.
An NSA intercept from Ramstein Air Force Base.
A car rental from Kaiserslautern, the closest town to Ramstein AFB.
A Dutch employee of the Canadian consulate in Amsterdam accused of selling passport blanks to a known document forger.
A tap on the phone line of a Dutch lawyer who was under suspicion of being a double agent.
The murder of the same known document forger as the one implicated in the case of the consulate employee.
The name and telephone number of the owner of a well-known expatriate bar found in the iPhone directory of the forger.
The resultant still photo from the expatriate bar’s security cameras after the rousting of the bar owner by the Militaire Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service commonly known as the MIVD.
After she’d compared it to the computer dossier, the still photo was the icing on the cake. Carrie plucked all the Post-its off her cubicle wall, rearranged them in order just to make sure, then put them into her personal shredder one by one. Then she turned to the telephone.
“Tell him what you told me,” said Rufus Kingman, deputy director of operations. Kingman was the replacement for Mike Harris after that man’s defection to the dark side and his consequent dark and violent end in the bowels of central Africa. Kingman was a young man trying to be old schooclass="underline" dark suits, white shirts, ties with small knots and razor-cut hair. Joseph Patchin, director of operations, really was old school and he didn’t like Rufus Kingman one tiny little bit. On the other hand, Kingman’s father was a onetime White House chief of staff and a big stick in the Pallas Group and it never hurt to have a soft place to land when you finally pulled the rip cord on the civil service parachute. Pensions weren’t what they used to be, and his divorce was eating him alive.
The young woman standing in front of him was young, pretty and dark-haired. She had the Irish good looks and long legs he’d found so attractive in his wife once upon a time, but he’d been married too long and was getting too old to care very much, which was a depressing thought all on its own.
Apparently the young lady was an analyst out of the Western European Section, an area of the Company he rarely thought about and almost never visited. Her name, according to Kingman’s quick and dirty briefing over the telephone, was Carrie Pilkington.
“Yes, Miss Pilkington?”
The girl was very straightforward and spoke without hesitation. “Colonel John Holliday and his friend Eddie Cabrera are in Cuba. Cabrera’s older brother, Domingo, has disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Domingo Cabrera is a member of the Dirección de Inteligencia, or DI, and the bodyguard and driver for Deborah Castro Espin, Raul Castro’s eldest daughter.” Carrie Pilkington paused. “Both Holliday and Cabrera are traveling on forged passports.”
“How sure are you of this information?”
“One hundred percent.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“We know Cabrera phoned from Ramstein and discovered that his brother had disappeared. We know Holliday was in Amsterdam at Darby’s expatriate bar and that he inquired after fresh documents. We know a document forger named Dirk Hartog was killed in his own workshop with his own nine-millimeter Walther PPK. Presumably he’d tried to cheat or otherwise betray Holliday and his friend.” The girl paused again. “Just before coming up here, I received confirmation from the RCMP’s Canadian Security Intelligence Service that two men answering the descriptions of Cabrera and Holliday boarded an Air Canada direct flight to Havana.”