Orkney Springs, Virginia
April 2011
It was an eclectic gathering to say the least. Laura stared in disbelief at a cast of characters she thought had been killed in Afghanistan years ago along with Mako Sloane. One by one they approached Laura and embraced her like a long-lost sister. Each of them was a CIA veteran of 30 years or more, and each had paid a heavy price for his loyalty to Sloane. They had shared his fate and spent most of the past decade in various federal correctional institutions. Guilt by association, nothing more. As a child, Laura once had attended an Old Timer’s All Star baseball game at RFK Stadium in Washington. She couldn’t help but see eerie similarities with this unlikely reunion of covert luminaries.
At fifty-five, Tupelo McSweeney was the youngest of the group. As his name implied, Tupelo was a southern boy from Mississippi who had grown up shooting squirrels, water moccasins, and raccoons with a .22 rifle he got for his sixth birthday. He was the acknowledged weapons expert of the group and had thrown his weight behind one of the warring factions in almost every third world war of national liberation over the past quarter century…at least those of interest to the United States government and the Central Intelligence Agency. If shots had been fired in anger, Tupelo would have been found on the side of one of the pissed-off parties.
Tupelo’s involuntary abstention from drinking his beloved Wild Turkey during his seven-year incarceration following Sloane’s arrest had been the most annoying aspect of an otherwise instructional period of his life. He had refused to partake of the homemade hooch brewed surreptitiously in the slammer. He claimed those fermented concoctions offended the sensibilities of a serious drinker in addition to giving him the shits. Tupelo had arrived at Sherwood Forest the previous day after receiving the emergency summons on his previously unused beeper. Laura could not help but notice how slim and fit he looked. Prison, apparently, had some redeeming features. Nothing much to do except read and work out on the weight pile, or so she imagined.
A tall gaunt man with short-cropped gray hair got up slowly from his seat in front of the fireplace and stretched, grimacing. Tiger Buxton had earned his nickname years ago in a surfing accident with Mako Sloane off San Diego when a tiger shark made off with most of his left foot. Things might have gone even worse for him, but Buxton was able to gouge the bulging right eye of the shark with the surf comb he pulled from the side pocket of his trunks, and the eight-foot shark had disappeared into the depths. Sloane had helped Buxton to the beach where he tied a tourniquet around the wounded surfer’s leg to stop the bleeding.
Tiger Buxton had been a CIA paramilitary instructor and explosives expert and had worked for years with Mako Sloane in Central America. He was rumored to have singlehandedly eliminated the command structure of a Cuban infantry brigade in Angola by setting fire to its headquarters with a homemade flammable mixture of Brylcreem and swimming pool chlorine. The Cubans ran out of the burning building and triggered a series of claymore mines Tiger had thoughtfully placed, which ended their dreams of national liberation. Tiger limped over to Laura and kissed her on the cheek.
The fourth member of the Sherwood Forest team was standing in the corner and was almost invisible in the darkness. His stooped figure was occasionally illuminated by the flames from the fire place. He seemed reluctant to come out of the shadows, but after Tiger Buxton greeted Laura, he turned to the figure in the darkness and beckoned him forward.
“I think you two know each other. Laura, say hello to our erstwhile spiritual leader who has returned to the path of righteousness.”
“It’s me, Laura.” Drake Herrin had a tear in his eye and embraced Laura with a ferocity she had never seen in the old man. His long, white hair fell in her face, and she smelled alcohol on his breath. Drake had lost some of his pluck over the years, and he probably needed the booze to prop him up. Drake too had received the emergency summons the night before on his beeper. He had been briefed already about the attack on Laura, and he knew he had made the right decision. The team had brawn, and Drake Herrin would now add some analytical fire power. After all, he was the only one who had an inkling of what they were up against, and why the others had done their time in the slammer when Mako Sloane went down.
“Listen up, everyone!” Quindarius addressed the group as if they were convening a meeting of the local Kiwanis Club. He was smiling. It felt good to be back in action, even if he didn’t precisely know what was happening or why. He was just following instructions.
“It’s good to see everyone. You know, they say things happen for a reason. I think that’s a lot of bullshit myself. Tupelo, Tiger, and I had years of our lives taken away, and we never knew why. Oh, they were smart enough, all right. They separated us. Tupelo went to El Reno, Oklahoma. Tiger over there was carted off to Three Rivers in Texas, and the bastards sent me way up north to the high-security penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Don’t know about Tupelo and Tiger, but I spent the first couple of weeks introducing myself…establishing my place in the pecking order. It was like a racquetball ladder at the local fitness club but for a different type of sport. After that, they left me alone, but it was kind of lonely at the top.” Quindarius smiled cynically.
He continued with an edge in his voice. “Let me confirm what we’ve suspected all along. We were all set up, and Drake Herrin, I think, knows why and can tell us who was responsible.”
Drake stayed seated for a few seconds before he stood up. He knew he was going to have to come clean with the group but wasn’t expecting to be put on the spot like this, and it made him uneasy. How Quindarius knew about his role in the Sloane fiasco was a mystery. The episode had not been one of his finer moments, and the shame of what he did, or really, what he didn’t do, still smarted.
“I’m an old man now,” Drake began softly. “Something happened years ago that I might have been able to prevent. I chose not to press the issue. In the end, I believed the lies about Sloane. I sat back and let them arrest all of you instead of having faith in my people.” He looked around at the group dejectedly. “I let you all down.”
Quindarius stood up and put his arm reassuringly around Drake’s shoulders. “We don’t want to hear that, Drake. You didn’t know. Nobody expected a disinformation campaign to originate from the DDO’s office. We’re all on the same side now. That’s all that matters”
Herrin accepted the scotch on the rocks Laura offered him and continued. “There are still some things I can’t tell you. If this thing goes south, it’ll be better if you don’t know all the details. Let me just say that back in 1998 Mako Sloane submitted an intelligence report from Moscow that was so incredible and so incendiary, we didn’t believe it. Chase Mallory had recently become the Deputy Director of Operations, and he quashed the report. Said it was the most outlandish piece of disinformation the Russians had ever put out. Claimed he had reporting from other sources that contradicted Sloane’s intelligence. He completely ignored the fact that Mako Sloane’s reporting from Moscow had been unfailingly accurate for the previous twenty years.”
“So what happened to Mako? If he’s alive, where the hell is he?” Tiger Buxton snarled. Quindarius might have come to terms with his time in the Big House, but Tiger was still bitter. He spent over a year in solitary confinement after he sent a couple of Mexican gangbangers at Three Rivers to the hospital. The time by himself had only fed his resentment. Tiger was looking for payback.
Quinadrius stepped in and answered, “Tiger, let Drake finish. First things first. Besides, he doesn’t know where Sloane is. Even Laura doesn’t. I’m the only one who knows, and I’m not talking…at least not yet. You’ll see him soon enough. Any objections?” Quindarius looked around the room menacingly but then smiled.
The others stared at Quindarius. They knew that QL, as he was known to his intimate friends, had been Mako Sloane’s inseparable friend and personal bodyguard for years, but until now they hadn’t guessed he might be acting on Mako Sloane’s instructions, and that the summons to Orkney Springs could have come from Sloane.
Drake cleared his throat and continued. “A year later Sloane submitted another report on the same subject. It was detailed, specific, and well documented. I thought it couldn’t possibly be ignored. The report was even supported by several photographs Mako himself had taken. Mallory quashed this report and destroyed the photos as well. He and I were the only ones who saw the report, and I couldn’t convince him to act on it. He threatened to transfer me out of the Directorate of Operations if I didn’t drop the issue. I backed down. He was the director, and he convinced me the report was disinformation from the Russians.”
“Doesn’t sound like Sloane to let something like that drop,” said Tupelo in confusion.
“You know how it works, Tupelo. You never know what happens to the information you report. Sloane assumed his reports were passed on to the highest level of the government and used to formulate policy, like they always had been. He didn’t know the reports ended up in Mallory’s shredder.”
“Why didn’t you let him know?” asked Tiger suspiciously.
“I was scared,” Herrin admitted. “Three months later Mallory called me into his office and told me that Sloane was going to be indicted on corruption charges. Offshore bank accounts in his name…supposedly involved in the illegal arms trade with a former Soviet army general. Mallory had an entire file to back up the allegations. It seemed like an open-and-shut case. I accepted the evidence against Sloane. I washed my hands and turned my back. I thought Sloane had crossed the line.”
“And what did all that have to do with us?” asked Tiger, not getting the connection between Sloane’s arrest and his own.
“Here’s where facts give way to speculation, but I’ve had a long time to think about this and put two and two together.” Drake looked around the room, his eyes wide with excitement as he recalled the Sloane crisis. He took a long drink from his scotch on the rocks and continued. “You were all named as accomplices in Mako’s arms dealings, but I never thought that was the real reason you took the fall.”
“Mako was never interested in making money. He certainly would never have been in cahoots with a Russian general on any arms deal.” Quindarius interrupted adamantly.
“That was my thinking as well. The case against him looked watertight, though. The documents appeared to be authentic. But again, that all was a red herring, in my opinion.”
“Will you get to the point, Drake!” Tiger raised his voice impatiently.
“Tiger, the long and short of it was that you were all arrested and sent down the river to keep you quiet. The irony was that there was nothing for you to keep quiet about. You didn’t know what Mallory suspected you knew. Sloane had never shared that information with you.”
Tiger stood up and limped around the room utterly confused. Nothing was making sense to the grizzled veteran. He wasn’t alone. Everybody in the room had the same question on their lips. “Why would the Deputy Director for Operations want to keep his own people quiet…unless….”
“I see we’re all coming to the same conclusion,” Drake said sadly.
Mako whistled softly and shook his head.
“I believe Chase Mallory himself was following orders,” concluded Drake. I think he was working for the Russians and probably had been for years.” Drake looked around the room to see how the group was taking his latest bombshell.
“Following orders is one thing, and working for the Russians is something completely different,” interjected Quindarius. “Where does the Russian connection come in?”
“You see, there was something else. Back in 1985 Sloane reported that a Washington D.C. phone number had been found in the wallet of a KGB major in Moscow. The name of that major was Vladimir Putin. Ring a bell? Anyway, I was Mallory’s supervisor back then, and I passed the phone number on to him to investigate and pass on to our counterintelligence people. He reported back that the number was a D.C. answering service. A dead end, and I let the matter drop.”
“I’m afraid I see where you’re going with this,” said Quindarius with concern.
“It’s not complicated, really, but sometimes hindsight seems clairvoyant compared to what we were thinking at the time. When I left the CIA and cleared out my desk, I ran across that phone number and called it out of idle curiosity. Mallory was right…sort of. It was an automatic voice mailbox, but it was Chase Mallory’s voice that answered. Vladimir Putin had Mallory’s phone number in his wallet that day when he met Sloane in Moscow!”