FIFTEEN

Preston Allender, sole proprietor of the Birnam Woods Import Company, escorted a breezy young decorator to the front door of the house.

“It’s for Corinda Wadley,” the young man gushed. “So, of course, it has to be special and unique.”

“Of course,” Allender said, fighting an urge to roll his eyes. He had no idea who Corinda Whazzit was, but obviously she was an architectural trend-setting goddess of some kind, one of many in this town of superheated egos. “I can guarantee the ‘unique’ part; the trees that produce that wood grow on the quiet side of a single volcano on Java. An entire wall paneled in that will absolutely be one of a kind. Think amber room.”

“Perfect,” the decorator said. “Michaela Valentine told me to contact you; she said if anybody could come up with a one-of-a-kind it would be you.”

“Let me know the precise square footage plus your craftsman’s wastage estimate and I’ll put things in motion,” Allender said, as they shook hands and the decorator left.

Allender went through to his tower study and made some notes on what he needed to acquire. It had been over a year since he’d left the Agency, and he’d found the perfect endeavor to pursue. His father, who’d hailed originally from Northern California, had long been a woodworking enthusiast. Living in Taipei, he’d discovered the amazing world of Asiatic trees and their exotic woods. Allender could still remember sitting in his father’s woodworking shop in the back of the family compound, with the scent of perfumed veneers taken from trees in Java, Burma, Japan, and Malaysia permeating the air, while his father turned sheets of gleaming wood from skinned tree branches.

His father would take him along on his expeditions out into Asia’s jungles in search of exotic trees. He would also collect rough-cut gemstones, such as unpolished rubies in Burma and blocks of jadeite along the coastal villages of Indochina. From Japan he accumulated a netsuke menagerie crafted from Borneo rosewood and ivory, and from Hong Kong a Qing dynasty chess set made entirely of exquisite white jade. His parents slowly sold off the jewelry collection to fund their own retirement years; the exotic-wood specimen collection, however, was never sold, and Preston still had the bulk of it stored in his town house basement. With his parents now gone, he still liked to take a Scotch downstairs and ruminate through the drawers of gorgeous veneers stored between sheets of rice paper. The most expensive and rare woods were kept in a walk-in vault, built during the Second World War by a previous owner. The vault was twelve square feet, with concrete walls two feet thick and containing six large safes.

With literally nothing to do after being forced out at the Agency and the usual postgovernment jobs proscribed to him he’d decided to resume his passion for acquiring beautiful veneers from faraway places. He traveled mostly into Asia, where his Mandarin gained him admittance to the more selective markets. The idea to turn his hobby into a business had come when he’d had some of the rooms in his own town house refurbished. He’d wanted to panel one of them in a spiral-grained walnut, but couldn’t find anyone who could actually supply the veneers in a size suitable for paneling. He’d asked his neighbors on one side, both decorators, and one of them observed that someone could make a fortune in Washington if he could provide veneers like that. Birnam Woods was born a month after.

Finding the wood wasn’t that difficult. Getting through all the import restrictions brought on by environmentalist groups was. Allender knew ways and means of getting exceptions from the ever-expanding regulations and special licenses by enlisting the aid of people he knew on the Hill. At the supply end in Asia, of course, all it took was money for the product and the occasional well-directed bribe.

The phone rang as he was enjoying a Scotch while perusing his order book. It turned out to be a staffer in Carson McGill’s office. Could Doctor Allender come out to a meeting at Langley first thing in the morning? He asked the caller why. That briefly stumped the staffer, who could only come up with a rather lame “Because he told me he wanted to see you first thing in the morning? Sir?”

He told the flustered young man to inform Mr. McGill that he was busy tomorrow morning, and then hung up. McGill himself called back five minutes later.

“My dear Preston,” he said, in an exasperated voice. “Don’t be an ass.”

“I have things to do tomorrow morning, Carson, and Agency business is no longer my concern, remember?”

“Yes, yes, I know that. I still need to talk to you, and I need to do so in a secure environment. I’m the acting deputy director, now, by the way.”

“Well, good for you,” Allender said.

“How’s your little ex-im scheme working for you these days, Preston? No problem getting federal licenses or anything like that? No EPA queries on whether those precious veneers of yours are sustainably farmed?”

“Fuck off and die, Carson,” Allender said, mildly, and then put the phone down. Officious little prick, he thought. Come see me or I’ll call Commerce and get them to claw back your licenses? He snorted in disgust. His first response had been the correct response.

The next morning when Allender came down for coffee, however, he groaned when he spied a black Suburban with tinted windows sitting out in front of his house. Another one was parked across the avenue. He shook his head, went to the kitchen, fired up the coffeemaker, and made two cups of coffee, which he took to his study. He then went to the front door and opened it. A minute later Carson McGill was sitting uncomfortably in an antique Victorian wing chair as if he had a broomstick up his grommet.

“Okay,” Allender said. “Since you went to all this trouble, why are you here?”

“I’ll get right to it,” McGill said. “Hank Wallace is dead.”

Allender blinked as he absorbed this news. “What happened?”

“We have no goddamned idea, is the short answer,” McGill said. “He didn’t come in to work, so his EA went out to the house in McLean and found him sitting in his study, in a recliner, wearing PJs, bathrobe, and slippers, eyes wide open and deader’n a doornail.”

“Who’d the EA call?”

“Me, of course,” McGill replied.

“Oh, right,” Allender said.

“Yes,” McGill sighed, ignoring the sarcasm. “Naturally. The cause of death is officially ‘undetermined.’ Autopsy revealed no causative mechanisms. No trauma, no toxicology vectors, organic disease. There were no signs of forced entry. No evidence that anyone else had been in the room. Nothing moving on the security cameras. No houseguests. According to the housekeeper, nothing out of place.”

“When did this happen?” Allender asked. “I’ve seen nothing in the news.”

“Two weeks ago,” McGill said. “We’ve kept it clamped down. That’s why I’m now the acting deputy director, by the way.”

“Who else?” Allender said.

“In any event, the Agency decided to keep it close-hold until we could determine what happened. Or at least that’s what I tried to do.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that the director, in his unending quest for bureaucratic transparency and fair play, told our best friend in Congress, Congresswoman Martine Greer, who immediately asked the Bureau to conduct an investigation.”

Allender grunted. The Bureau. The enduring enmity between the FBI and the Agency was legendary throughout the Washington bureaucracy, a fact of which the chairwoman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence was undoubtedly, and happily, quite aware.

“They getting anywhere?”

“They are not,” McGill said, giving Allender a meaningful look. “In fact they’ve asked for some help. From us. Actually…”

“No, thank you,” Allender said quickly. “I’m retired, remember? I distinctly remember doing that. Retiring. In your office. Harsh words and everything, yes? And all at your initiative.”

McGill raised his hands to forestall any further protests. “The Bureau has formally requested that the Agency assign a senior liaison officer to their investigation team. I want you to do it.”

“Good grief, Carson. Don’t you think they want someone who’s still in service and not some guy who was forced out and doesn’t even have his clearances anymore?”

“Actually,” Carson said. “they will recognize that this is a great idea. An active-duty Agency officer would always have two masters—his boss back at the Agency, and the Bureau’s team leader. A retired officer, on the other hand, could work exclusively for her.”

“Her?”

“Yes, her name is Rebecca Lansing.”

“If she believes that, she must be pretty new in town,” Allender observed.

McGill laughed. “Indeed,” he said. “She’s actually one of Hingham’s pets, seconded a year ago to the Bureau headquarters. Basically, I suspect that the older hands at the Hoover Building fell all over themselves ducking this tasking. She apparently zigged when she should have zagged. If it’s any help, she’s quite attractive.”

“Wait a minute,” Allender protested. “If she’s an Agency crossdeck, then what the hell do they need a another liaison officer for? Isn’t that why she’s there in the first place?”

“Why she’s there is known only to J. Everett,” McGill said. “I don’t know her background, other than that she’d recently completed three years as the Company officer on a joint antiterror task force out in LA at the FBI field office. She’s probably one of Hingham’s famous ‘dark’ sources. Is that coffee for me?”

Allender handed over the second coffee. McGill took a sip and then his face brightened. “Excellent,” he said. “To be candid, we’re not exactly enthusiastic about having Buroids under our feet. I think they want a second liaison officer so that they can spread the blame when they come up empty-handed.”

“Exactly what I would think, too,” Allender said. “So, are we done here?”

“Well,” McGill said, ignoring him again. “I talked to His Lordship, himself, just this morning. Told him I wanted to bring you back in for this one.”

Allender grunted. “I’ll bet he just broke wind with joy at that proposition,” he said.

McGill smiled. “You’re half right,” he said. “Between you, me, and the gatepost, I think he agreed in order to give you the opportunity to step in something so that he could fire you all over again.”

“Sounds about right,” Allender said. “So tell me: Why would you want me to get into this mess?”

“Because we think Hank Wallace was running a swan,” McGill said.

Allender stared at him for a moment. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“Not one pound, unfortunately,” McGill replied.

“But I would have assumed that that program’s long dead.”

“And that’s what I thought, too.”

Allender thought for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s review the bidding: Since that program was supposedly terminated when I left, it seems to me that you’ve got two problems. First, what happened to Hank, and, second, how did a cauterized program come back to life without your knowledge, O Great DDO?”

McGill sighed as he leaned back in his chair. He took off his glasses and began to rub his eyes. Allender remembered this routine, too, and could almost predict the speech that McGill was about to crank up. Sometimes in the course of human events …

“Spare me,” he said, before McGill could get up a head of steam. “I’ll reluctantly lend a hand, but I’ll want a signed contract. From the director. Clearances as necessary, and, of course I must know the identity of the swan.”

“I can get you all the paper cover you need,” McGill said. “Clearances, access, pay, and allowances, but not the operative who was going to initiate the swan.”

“Carson,” Allender began, but McGill raised his hand.

“We don’t know who he or she is,” he said, quietly.

Allender stared. “Wow,” he said, finally.

“Yeah,” McGill said. “Wow.”

“How is this possible?” Allender asked. “You were still DDO when Hank cranked this up, correct?”

McGill flushed. “Yes, I was. Still am, actually. Double-hatted.”

“Because when you and I ran a swan, I had a boatload of support from your ops people. Controller Smith, central-casting prop managers, a top-tier team, and even a pet hotel. You’re telling me Hank got all that without your hearing about it?”

“Don’t rub it in, Preston,” McGill said. “But, apparently, yes to all of the above.”

“Damn!” Allender said. For a moment he even sympathized with the portly DDO. Then reason returned. “Well,” he said. “That means someone in your organization went around you. Way around you. That’s where you need to start, not with the Bureau. And not with me, either.”

“Trust me, Preston, I’m well ahead of you there.”

“Then what the hell do you want me to do?”

“Frustrate the goddamned FBI, of course. Lead them on every kind of wild-goose chase you can imagine. You’re a shrink—you can do that. Baffle them with bullshit. Lay down hints of dark deeds and sinister plots, and then seduce them into chasing down every fucking one of them. They’re a bunch of robots, for Chrissakes. Give ’em the dragon-eyes treatment. Do whatever it takes to give us time to figure out what the fuck Hank Wallace was up to.”

Allender didn’t know what to say that could get him out of this one. McGill’s vulgar language indicated how upset he was. “And you have no ideas?” he asked.

“One,” McGill admitted. “And, truth in lending, it’s not my idea. It’s the director’s.”

“I’m all ears,” Allender said.

“It’s something to do with Martine Greer.”

Allender closed his eyes. Holy shit, he thought. We talked about this a long time ago. Carson, you idiot. Run, he thought. Run. Now.

McGill read his thoughts. “Full active-duty pay,” he said. “The Bureau will treat you as an SES-2; you know how rank-conscious they are. You will report to me and me alone. I’ll assign a security detail and a car.”

“No.”

“Please, Preston. I know we can’t really make you do this, but you offer some special—skills that I think this problem will need. And besides, I think somebody killed Hank. We have to know who that somebody was, but we have to find out our way.”

Allender took off his glasses and treated McGill to as cold a look as he could manage. McGill was clearly uncomfortable with that look, but this morning he was being terribly brave. “That somebody probably speaks Mandarin,” Allender said.

“Yes,” McGill said. “And so do you. Please?”

Allender felt a black weight descending onto his shoulders. “Carson,” he said. “They’re not dopes over there in the Hoover Building. They’ll recognize a stall when they see one.”

“Our feeling is that they’ll be so busy trying to figure you out that they won’t recognize a stall.”

“Who’s working it for the Agency?”

“If you don’t know, you can’t tell,” McGill said. “It’s not that we don’t trust you—just standard compartmentalization. The important thing is that our people will know who you are and why you’re working with the Bureau.”

“Is there an autopsy report?”

“Yes, and the Bureau has a copy.”

“Who did the autopsy?”

“The Borgias,” McGill replied, obviously getting tired of answering questions. Allender wondered when McGill would recognize that he was being stalled.

“The Bureau’s lab is the best there is, when they’re not cooking the books. Why the Borgias?”

“The Borgias” was the in-house nickname for the Agency’s poison laboratory, which was part of the Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Weapons Department. “Because the autopsy revealed no apparent cause of death,” McGill said.

“Couldn’t he have just—died? He’s what—sixty-something? Smokes? Drank like a fish, from what I was told.”

“All of those vices—booze, tobacco, old age, sexual perversion—leave traces. A heart attack leaves traces. A stroke leaves traces. What the hell, Preston: You’re a doctor—there were no fucking traces!”

“You still have the remains?”

“No,” McGill said. “He was a lifetime bachelor, like you, no surviving relatives, so we had the remains cremated after the examination. We did save tissue samples, of course, in case someone comes up with a viable theory.”

“What if the Bureau comes up with a viable theory?”

“Report it.”

“What if I come up with a viable theory?”

“Report it, but only to me. But theories aren’t your brief, Preston. The big stall. That’s your brief.”

“This is beginning to sound as if you know someone in the Agency had a hand in this little whodunit.”

McGill got up, his coffee unfinished. “Now you’re catching on, Preston.” He looked at his watch. “I must go,” he said. “Logistics to follow. I’ve told the Hooverites to expect you tomorrow at ten o’clock.”

“Everyone in the Hoover Building is at his desk and urgently leaning forward by seven thirty in the morning,” Allender said.

“Set the precedent on the first day, Preston,” McGill advised. “You’re a senior liaison officer from another agency, not a Buroid temp. If they’re all in at seven thirty, then they should be well prepared to brief you by the time you arrive. At ten. It’s kinda like what old wives tell new wives: Don’t do anything in the first week of marriage that you don’t want to do for the rest of your married life.”

*   *   *

The next morning, Allender surveyed his new office and wondered who’d been kicked out of it on short notice. He’d been delivered to the Hoover Building in an Agency car and met at the main entrance by an athletic-looking young man with a shaved head and a friendly greeting. His building passes were ready except for a picture. The ID tech asked him to remove his glasses, and Allender obliged. After a moment the tech said he could go ahead and put them back on. Then he took the picture. Once they were on the third floor, the agent had shown him where the bathrooms and the elevators were and warned him that the elevators were unreliable and the bathrooms something of an embarrassment. He then told him that Supervisory Special Agent Rebecca Lansing would be down shortly to meet him and give him an in-brief.

There was neither a computer nor a secure telephone in the office, but McGill had promised him both would be supplied from the Agency, the Bureau’s comms equipment being notoriously antiquated. The office was spacious enough but shabby. In fact the whole building was shabby, victim of ten years of budgetary neglect while the General Services Administration tried to decide where to build a new headquarters. The GSA had been getting lots of help and advice from the competing congressional delegations of Maryland and Virginia, who were desperate to acquire the eleven thousand federal taxpayers who staffed Bureau headquarters.

“Doctor Allender?” a voice said from behind him. He turned to find an attractive if somewhat stern-looking woman standing in the office doorway. She was in her late thirties, with black hair, an enticing figure modestly dressed in a dark pantsuit, and lovely blue-green eyes. “I’m Rebecca Lansing. I’m running the Wallace case.”

She offered a handshake and he took it, which was not his usual custom at all. She indicated that he should sit at the desk and then she took one of the two armchairs parked in front of the desk. She pulled out a gold-plated NRA bullet pen and a notebook.

“Before I start filling you in, can you tell me what your area was at the Agency?”

He nodded. “I was in the training business,” he replied. “I trained our interrogators and what you would call our profilers. I also conducted annual interviews with management staff to assess their emotional and intellectual capacity to continue in their present positions.”

“May I ask what qualified you to do those things?” For a brief moment he started to take offense to that question, but then realized she hadn’t asked it in any sort of “what makes you so special” manner.

“I’m a psychiatrist, for one,” he replied. “I also have some small ability to seize control of or manipulate an individual’s emotions once I have him or her under suitable duress.”

“Are you a mind reader, then?” she asked with a completely straight face, as if mind readers were a common occurrence.

“Most of the time I am not,” he said.

“Most of the time.”

He smiled but did not reply.

“Oka-a-y,” she said. “Did Mister McGill tell you what’s happened?”

“Only that someone found the Agency’s deputy director, Hank Wallace, dead in his study, and that there’s been no apparent cause of death or manner of death determination, either by the Agency or by the Bureau’s review of the autopsy. That’s about it.”

“Are you familiar with homicide investigations?”

“No,” he said. “Nor was I aware that the Bureau did homicide investigations.”

She nodded. “Normally we don’t. We assist local police authorities, when asked, or if we think the incident bears on something bigger. And I guess that’s my next question for you: Is there something bigger going on here? Something that would provoke the chairwoman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to inject the Bureau into what looks an awful lot like an Agency goat-grab?”

He smiled. “It’s possible, Special Agent—is that the proper form of address, by the way?”

“Langley told us that they brought you back on active service as an SES-2. That means I may call you ’sir,’ and you can call me anything you’d like. Rebecca, if you wish, Supervisory Special Agent Lansing if you must.”

“Okay, Rebecca,” he said. “I’ve been retired for just over a year. Once someone like me leaves the Great Game we just go, and that’s that, as it should be. So I’m not sure what’s behind Martine Greer’s request, either from an operational or a bureaucratic perspective. It could just be devilment. According to McGill, I’m here because you asked for a senior liaison officer.”

At that moment a young man arrived with Allender’s completed building pass and a set of FBI credentials, minus the golden badge.

“It’s just that we didn’t expect a senior executive service officer,” she said, once the young man left. “I was thinking more like assistant division head. Someone who knows who’s who in the zoo, but not a boss.”

He studied her for a moment. “Did you volunteer,” he asked, “to head up this task force, assuming that’s what it’s called?”

“No,” she said. “I was assigned by the FBI director’s office to run it.”

“And could that possibly have been because every other senior agent within shouting distance had already made it to high cover?”

She smiled. “It’s possible,” she replied, echoing his own answer.

“May have been a similar situation over at Langley,” he said. “So, when everybody else has managed to slip the trap, Langley resorted to getting a retiree, a senior one. He’s got nothing to lose, careerwise. Even better, he’ll be your asset and not the Agency’s because no one over there in Langley wants to touch this one.”

She nodded but didn’t say anything.

“Why’d you want another liaison officer, anyway?” he asked. “There’s already a liaison office here for that, isn’t there?”

“Actually,” she said. “Truth-in-lending time. I’m really with the Agency.”

“Sure you are.”

“Yes, I am. I’m a special projects officer in Director Hingham’s office. I am the unlisted, if you will, Agency liaison officer at the Bureau headquarters. There’s another person in the Hoover Building who is the ‘public’ CIA liaison officer, but I work out of the FBI deputy director’s office, where I do compartmented tasking, like this little cluster. Before that I was out in LA, doing pretty much the same thing with the LA field office, except there I was out in the open. The Bureau has these intel fusion centers in their bigger field offices. I led a team of three operators on their antiterror task force.”

“My, my,” Allender said. “And before that?”

“One low-level posting overseas in the CS.”

“And then, two exchange assignments with the Bureau?”

“The Agency sometimes doesn’t know what to do with their female officers, especially one tied to Hingham. I think there’s a bit of old-guard mistrust involved. You know, spies are supposed to be men, not women.”

“As everyone well knows,” he said.

She smiled. “Yeah, but. It suits me, though. Working at Langley was getting boring. Everybody my age was much more focused on getting ahead than getting the bad guys. I like working with the G-men—and women. They’re serious about the job at hand. Anyway, Director Hingham wanted this one compartmentalized from regular channels, so I was directed to ‘volunteer,’ to the sound of much applause over here, I must admit. Besides, if Wallace’s death was a hit, that would be a really big deal and the Bureau would have an interest.”

“Yes, it would,” Allender said, remembering McGill’s use of that same term. “So: What do you want from me?”

“Senior-level access. I can do the worker-bee-level stuff. Keep us from spinning our wheels.”

“I can certainly do that,” he said. “But you do realize the Agency’s got a team working this incident, too, right? Who would probably be delighted if you spun your J. Edgar wheels right off?”

She cocked her head to one side and just looked at him for a moment. “So,” she said, but then apparently changed her mind about what she’d been about to say. She asked a question instead: “Is it true you were called Dragon Eyes when you were still serving?”

“Never to my face, Rebecca,” he replied, softly. “So when do I get to meet the rest of the team?”