At the end of his first day among the First Team, Allender went out the front entrance to find a black Expedition waiting for him. He got into the backseat only to discover that Carson McGill was sitting in the right front seat.
“Honey, I’m home,” Allender announced, and McGill snorted. He told the driver to drive down to the Mall. When they neared the World War II memorial, the car stopped. They got out and went for a walk.
“What do they know?” he asked.
“Not much,” Allender said. “They never saw the scene, the body, or a CSI report, and if I’m not mistaken, they don’t have a clue as to what to do next.”
“Good,” McGill said. “I was hoping that’s what you’d find.”
“There is the slightest possibility that they know they’re being fucked with.”
“Of course they do,” McGill said. “That’s why I’m going to provide you with a list of names. These are supposedly people who’ve gotten across the breakers with Wallace over the years. Some people he fired, some others who wanted his job but were outmaneuvered, two women who accused him of sexual harassment, and a guy who claimed Wallace was working for another intelligence service. Some are still active, some retired. The guy who accused him of being a spy is ‘missing.’”
“Any merit to any of those accusations?”
“The women, possibly. Hank was a hands-on kinda guy when it came to pretty women. Grew out of it once he became Deppity Dawg, or so I was told.”
“And you want me to hand this list over to the Bureau team?”
“Yup,” McGill said. “Give them some bones to gnash. They’re good at investigating people, and it fits: who else would have a motive, if it was a homicide.”
“You think it was a homicide?”
McGill shrugged. “Our lab people say that the absence of any evidence of what might have killed him suggests that something seriously occult did the deed. They’re talking to the NIH as we speak.”
“The Bureau team really wishes you hadn’t cremated the remains.”
“We kept tissue samples, as I told you. We’ll share if they wish.”
“I think they do wish, but they’ve not been able to find out how to get some samples.”
“Tell them to talk to their CIA liaison officer,” McGill said, as the driver, responding to some signal Allender hadn’t seen, drew alongside the curb. “Metro’s right up there,” McGill said, as he got back into the Expedition. “Your comms gear will be in place at home and in your FBI office by midnight.”
As the big black vehicle pulled out into traffic, Allender realized McGill hadn’t given him any list. The nearest Metro station was Smithsonian, about a half mile away. He started walking, oblivious to the thinning crowds of tourists admiring all the monuments, but then he found himself having to step aside for an organized tour group of chattering Chinese tourists, who were dutifully following their tour leader down toward the Lincoln Memorial. The tour leader had a bright red flag raised over her head to ensure that none of her charges went astray. They were mostly middle-aged men and women and not the usual giggling crowd of uniformed foreign students one encountered on the Mall.
Then Allender caught sight of one older man, clacking along as fast as he could go, his walking stick swinging awkwardly as he brought up the rear some fifty feet behind the group. He was white-haired, with a heavily seamed, hatchet-shaped face and veined hands. He was wearing a padded jacket straight out of the Cultural Revolution days over baggy black pants and elaborately strapped sandals. There were even some red flag pins on the lapels of his coat to complete the picture of absolute Party loyalty.
As he came abreast of Allender he stopped in midstride, exhaled a loud breath, and then fixed Allender with a beady eye. “Walk with me, Dragon Eyes,” he said in high-class Mandarin. “If you please.”
The old man turned off onto one of the Mall’s many cross paths and Allender, intrigued, obligingly followed him while looking discreetly for minders. They were right below the Washington Monument, which loomed some 550 feet above them. The old man found a bench he liked, sat down, and patted the spot next to him. Allender joined him, having already spotted three likely minders wandering aimlessly out on the grassy expanse of the Mall, but all within pistol range.
“As I’m sure you have surmised, I am not a tourist,” the old man said, looking thoughtfully across the grass at the distant White House.
“Your Mandarin gives you away, I’m afraid,” Allender said.
“And someone has stripped the zhuyin from yours,” the old man said admiringly. Allender was well aware that mainland Chinese thought the Taiwanese version of standard Mandarin was, at best, amusing. He’d just been complimented. The banal chitchat went on for a few minutes. In the meantime Allender had spotted more minders. Six in all, so this old man was definitely somebody. Allender waited patiently, knowing that sooner or later he would get to the point. Eventually he did.
“Do you know the fable about marking the boat for the sword?” he asked.
Allender knew better than to say yes, even though, yes, he did. When he’d been a student of Mandarin and Chinese ways in Taiwan, Chinese fables were often used to illustrate a point, but never directly. Keeping the explanation murky imputed superior knowledge to the one telling the fable. Educated Chinese kids figured that out at about age fourteen and learned to just shut up and listen, which in itself was a useful lesson.
“Well,” the old man began. “A man from the state of Chu was crossing a river. Suddenly, his sword fell into the water while he was sitting in the boat. He immediately made a mark on the side of the boat. ‘This is where my sword fell off,’ he announced. When the boat finally stopped moving, he went into the water to look for his sword at the place where he had marked the boat. But, of course the boat had moved, not the sword. The moral being that that was a foolish way to look for something.”
“I would have to agree,” Allender said. “And what does that story have to do with me?”
The old man turned to face him. His right eye stared right at him; the left eye seemed to be slightly out of alignment. “You are looking for something,” the old man said. “In a foolish way.”
Allender considered the message. “May I know who you are?” he asked, finally.
“I am Yang Yi. I am visiting your lovely city from Beijing, where I am the deputy minister for state security in the current government of Xi Jinping.”
Allender turned to study this man. Up close, he wasn’t as old as he’d looked coming up the sidewalk. Maybe early seventies, with a very stern face, whose skin stretched across his cheekbones like a mosaic. If he was who he was claiming to be, he was a powerful official indeed. In China, the Ministry of State Security combined the functions of the American CIA, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security. What in the world was someone that high up in the Chinese government doing walking around the Mall and wanting to speak to him, he wondered.
“Do not be alarmed, Dragon Eyes,” the old man said. “Those people out there are here to protect me, not harm you.”
“I understand that, Minister,” Allender said. “But why do you call me that?”
“Because that is your file name, Doctor Allender. We are interested in you, even though you are supposed to be retired.”
“I am retired. For just over a year now.”
“And yet you rode off to the headquarters of your Federal Bureau of Investigation just this morning.”
“You have me under surveillance?” Allender protested. “What on earth for?”
“As you were undoubtedly taught in your fancy American school in Taipei, we Chinese operate on a different time scale than you Americans do. Americans want everything now. We are willing to be patient, to wait and watch, sometimes for years, in order to reach our objectives, even when exercising such patience creates temporary loss.”
Allender made a sound of exasperation. “I am not the Orphan of Zhao, Minister.”
“Quite so,” Yang said, recognizing yet another ancient tale. “But perhaps I am. The disappearance of your deputy minister is not what you think. Probe your shoulders. See if there are not some invisible strings there.” He stood up with a small groan. “It has been a pleasure to meet you. Hopefully not for the last time.”
A nondescript sedan had appeared on the access road nearest their bench. Yang Yi clacked his way to the car, where three serious-looking individuals in loose suit coats opened the door, handed him in, and then got in themselves before speeding away into Washington’s evening traffic.
Allender sighed, got up, and started walking up the Mall to the Metro station to begin the trip back to Dupont Circle. This “chance” encounter on the Mall with a very senior MSS official was disturbing to say the least. Allender’s reference to The Orphan of Zhao, about a wronged son’s long wait for revenge, had been deliberate. He’d used that story to probe whether or not this encounter had anything to do with the black swan. Apparently, it did.
Back at his town house he changed into his usual evening wear of slacks and a smoking jacket and went to the tower study for his Scotch. Now he had a problem. Two, actually. Tell McGill about his encounter or not? Normally he would have been on the phone already, but that one comment, elliptical as it had been, was stopping him. “You are looking for something in a foolish way.” Throughout his upbringing in Taipei, he had been exposed to the art of the indirect message. Rarely did educated Chinese come right out and say something, especially if it involved criticism. They would reminisce about something that had happened in the past, or, like Yang Yi, resort to fables. You were supposed to pay attention and, sometimes, only later, get the point. That way no one lost face if you didn’t understand it right away.
What was it he was looking for? In theory, he was helping the Bureau team look for the answer to Hank’s mysterious death. In practice, he’d been directed by McGill to stall the Bureau’s efforts, while the Agency looked for the answers to Hank’s mysterious death. That way, if something embarrassing emerged, the Agency could presumably bury it and generate a story that would satisfy everyone and no one. Basically, it was yet another way to save face.
His second problem was that the Chinese intelligence apparatus here in Washington, or what was left of it after the Chiang affair, was keeping eyes on him. If that was true, for the past year they must have spent a fortune in travel funds, as he’d gone far and wide around the world in his newly reenergized hobby/enterprise. The always slightly paranoid Chinese would certainly have interpreted his ex-im business as a cover for something covert, and yet, if they’d pulsed their sources in faraway places such as Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brazil, and even southern Africa, there would have been nothing to find. Yes, he would check in with the station chief in each embassy, explain why he was there, and then check out just before he left. The various officers were always polite but distant, having heard that this man, who’d scared the bejesus out of so many people, had been forced out. Their relief when he’d announce that he was leaving had been almost comical. The Chinese weren’t the only ones who were a bit paranoid when it came to Preston Allender.
So why the hell would the Chinese security services care about him, unless someone was assembling some payback for the Chiang debacle? Perhaps that’s what the little lecture on time scales had been about. We know that was your idea, and one fine day you will pay for it, but at a time and place that we will choose, and, as you know, we Chinese take our time, don’t we.
What was it McGill had said? Hank Wallace might have been running something against Martine Greer? Then he remembered that McGill himself had mused about doing the same thing. He also remembered discouraging that idea in the strongest terms. Maybe the thing to do was to pulse the putative target, Martine Greer. If Hank had indeed been cranking up some kind of out-there scheme to embarrass or destroy the chairwoman, maybe she could, wittingly or not, shed some light. Whether or not she would tell him was a different question, but if he phrased the question in terms of something being rotten in Langley, she just might.
He stared out the window into the twilight as he finished his Scotch. He was sitting in an armchair that gave him a view up the avenue through the venetian blinds. Traffic was lightening up as the rush hour subsided. Then he saw something that got his attention. Parked about twelve cars up on his side of the avenue and facing in his direction was an older-model sedan with two white faces visible through the windshield.
Well, now, he thought. Maybe he’d better make that phone call after all. Those weren’t Chinese. Those just about had to be McGill’s people, or possibly even Bureau people. If they were up on his house, then they’d been out there on the Mall, too. He got up and went to the secure telephone console.
McGill called him back in fifteen minutes, and Allender told him what had transpired out on the Mall. He did not mention the car parked up the avenue near his house.
“Well, that’s interesting,” McGill said. “I need to see if we knew that Yang Yi, himself, was in town. We’d better have.”
“I’m a wee bit concerned here, Carson,” Allender said. “The MSS is keeping book on me? And eyes? Only one reason for that.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know,” McGill said. “Goddamn Chiang. Tell me exactly what Yang said, again.”
Allender did.
“Jesus, I wish they would just come out and say what they mean instead of talking in freaking riddles like damned diplomats.”
“America’s two hundred fifty years old,” Allender said. “The Chinese have been practicing the diplomatic and intelligence arts for five thousand years. Maybe they know something we don’t.”
“I forget, don’t I,” McGill said. “You were brought up in China.”
“In Taiwan,” Allender said. “Big difference.”
McGill sniffed but did not reply. “You want eyes on you?” he asked finally.
Allender realized he had to be careful here. Not asking for protective surveillance might tell McGill that he already knew there was surveillance. What he didn’t know was whether or not those two guys in that car were protective surveillance—or simply surveillance. There shouldn’t be a distinction, but after Yang Yi, he was beginning to wonder. “No,” he said. “I’m not doing anything that bears reporting. Let them watch. By the way, where’s that list of names?”
“On your new computer, Preston. Time to open it and read your e-mail.”
Allender groaned. “Best thing about retirement, Carson,” he said. “You don’t have to read your e-mail.”
“Now you do,” McGill said. “Frequently. We’ll look into the Chinese watcher thing. Maybe roust a couple. Although, upon reflection, maybe not. What could it matter? As you say, you’re not doing anything but going to work each day. You just keep going through the motions over there in the Hoover Building. Confusion to the Bureau, right?”
“Absolutely,” Allender said, and then the line broke synch.
Upon reflection? Allender thought. Not much of it. He did, however, agree. Let them watch. He had to have been the most boring surveillance subject they’d ever handled.
* * *
The following morning he made a call to the congressional liaison office at the Agency and asked them to get him an appointment with Martine Greer. They asked for a topic for the office call. He told them Henry Wallace. Half an hour later they called back and told him that Greer’s AA, a Mr. Wyancowski, could see him at eleven thirty. Then he called Rebecca Lansing at Bureau headquarters and told her he was going up to the Hill to see someone and thus would not be in until later. She asked who he was seeing. He told her he’d fill her in if it turned out to be a productive meeting. She started to say something but then just said okay. He needed to keep reminding her that he didn’t work for her or the Bureau.
Wyancowski turned out to be a sixtyish man who looked as if he’d been on the Hill for his entire life, which was just about true. Allender was relieved. Longtime Capitol Hill staffers were adept at getting to the heart of the matter, which saved a lot of time. The title Administrative Assistant fooled the uninitiated. The AA was the senior staffer on a congressman’s Capitol Hill staff and basically the second-in-command in a congressman’s office. Looking at Wyancowski, Allender remembered the line from Shakespeare about Cassius’ lean and hungry look.
“Doctor Allender,” the AA began after they were seated in his office. Wyancowski kept a large, black chess clock that ticked backward from five minutes to zero perched upright on his desk and facing whomever was sitting in one of the chairs. “What can I do for you?” he said, as he started the clock.
“I’m here on the matter of Hank Wallace’s unexplained death.” Allender said. “I’ve been retired from the Agency for over a year. They’ve recalled me to work with the Bureau as a liaison officer to Langley on this matter.”
“I’ve been briefed on who you are, Doctor. Or ‘were,’ perhaps, is more accurate.” He glanced at the clock. “So why are you here, please?”
“I’m curious why Congresswoman Greer asked the Bureau to get into this investigation.”
“Surely you jest, Doctor Allender,” the AA said. “Given the chairwoman’s long and affectionate relationship with Langley, nest of snakes that it is, she probably saw it as a wonderful opportunity to poke someone in the eye with a sharp stick. I don’t know this, of course, as she doesn’t always explain why she does things. Is this news, Doctor Allender?”
“Under ordinary circumstances, no, Mister Wyancowski,” Allender replied. “Her long-standing antipathy is neither helpful nor news. But right now the feeling at Langley and the Bureau is that Hank Wallace may have been murdered, possibly even by a foreign intelligence service. If that’s true, this is not the time for bureaucratic bullshit.”
The AA sat back in his chair. “I wouldn’t advise using that particular term with the chairwoman. Hank Wallace was an institution at Langley. If someone did take him out, then the Agency’s counterintelligence directorate has a lot to answer for. I suspect she wanted to have some outside eyes looking into this matter so that Langley couldn’t cover up their own incompetence. Again. No offense—that’s just my opinion.”
There was an old-fashioned intercom console sitting on Wyancowski’s desk. Allender had noted that one of the little red lights was on. “Congresswoman Greer,” he said in a loud voice. “Care to comment?”
There was a strained moment of silence as the AA tried not to glance over at that little red light. Then a door disguised as part of the paneling at the back of the AA’s office opened, revealing the chairwoman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. She was a large woman, with a round, double-chinned face, short gray hair, and somewhat beady eyes. She had fatty biceps the size of small hams and wore a set of eyeglasses connected to a lanyard around her neck. Lovely you are not, Allender thought.
“I’ll take it from here, Tommy,” she announced, and then gestured with her head for Allender to follow her into her private office. Once there she pointed at a chair, sat down behind her desk, and flipped her own intercom button to the off position.
“Okay, Doctor, what’s this all about, comma, no shit?”
“I would like to know if you felt that Hank Wallace was cooking up some kind of plot or scheme to embarrass you, personally.”
Her face settled into a blank mask. Allender wondered if she played poker; she’d be damn good at it with that face. “What a question,” she said, finally. “Refresh my memory: What was your role at the Agency, Doctor?”
“I’m a psychiatrist. I was in the training directorate. I trained our senior interrogators in advanced psychological modalities. Sometimes I even did interrogations, myself. I also conducted annual interviews with senior training and operational staff to make sure they were still emotionally and psychologically fit to do their jobs. I was not operational in the Agency sense.”
“Ah, yes,” she said, nodding to herself. “I have heard of you. You’re the one they called Dragon Eyes, aren’t you.”
“Mostly, they called me Doctor Allender,” he replied, quietly.
“To your face, no doubt,” she said. “Why’d you retire—you seem a little young to be retired, especially from the SES.”
“I was forced out,” he said. “An operation that I consulted on succeeded too well and caused the White House some problems. Someone had to walk the plank, and it wasn’t going to be Carson McGill, Hank Wallace, or the director.”
“The black swan,” she said, admiringly. “That was you?”
“It was my idea, and I selected the woman who actually did it. The target was taken back to Beijing and executed, or so I was told.”
“So you were told?”
“I was in the training department, Madam Chairwoman. The Clandestine Service handled the operational details and all subsequent reporting. We live in boxes over there in Langley, and one box is discouraged from talking to other boxes. I assume that it’s true, however.”
“I received a briefing about that caper,” she said. “My source told me that the PRC intel infrastructure here in D.C. was decimated. General Chiang took a whole lot of people down with him. Why would that be?”
“Chiang staffed his operation here in town with members of his own faction, possibly even his own family. Competing factions back in Beijing probably saw an opportunity to wreck his whole crew.”
She nodded. “One more question, Doctor, and then I’ll answer yours. When they recalled you to active duty, did they tell you to help the Bureau or to lead them on a series of wild-goose chases while Langley tries to figure out—and deal with, in-house—what really happened?”
Allender recognized the crucial question. He had never met this woman before, but she had a reputation at the Agency of being hostile to how Langley performed its mission and was always ready to cause trouble for the Agency management. Having finally met her, however, Allender had the sense that to lie to her would get him nowhere, and, after meeting Yang Yi, he was beginning to feel like maybe, just maybe, Carson McGill hadn’t told him quite everything. “The latter,” he admitted.
“Thank you,” she said, emphatically. “Thank you for being straight with me. Now I’ll be straight with you. Hank Wallace and I have been at each other’s throats for years now. I think he played fast and loose with the millions we threw at the Agency, all in the name of national security, and I also think that if he could have found a way to knock me off my perch he’d have done it in a heartbeat.”
“So you’re devastated that he’s dead,” Allender said.
“Totally,” she said with a cold grin. “But here’s the thing: I’m up for reelection, along with everyone else here. It’s a year away, of course, but some rumors have surfaced back in my district that I am a closeted homosexual. Now, my district is correctly characterized as a churchgoing, Christian-family-values, Bible-thumping, gun-loving, and hugely conservative bunch.”
“How deplorable,” Allender mused.
She snorted. “I am, by the way, not a homosexual, so this is malicious. It might be coming from the guy who’s running against me, but I kinda don’t think so. It’s just not his style.”
“Maybe someone on his campaign staff?”
“No—his family is his campaign staff. It just doesn’t add up.”
“Someone here, then?”
“Interesting you should say that,” she said. “We’ve had a staff slot here in the committee staff office, as opposed to my district staff office, that’s held open for a liaison officer from the Agency. It’s not a big deal—he’s supposed to interface with middle management over there in Langley and facilitate my committee staff’s questions, from both sides of the aisle. Working-stiff level. That being said, I fired the last guy they sent over because he was patently nothing more than a spy for Henry Wallace.”
“How’d we react?”
“Langley sulked a little and then gapped the billet for a while. But just lately, they sent a replacement, a drop-dead-gorgeous blonde who has, according to Tommy, rebuffed the best efforts of every one of my male staffers to get a date. In the meantime she’s been sidling up to me, personally, with what I would call unearned social intimacy.”
“As in, I play for the other side; how about you?”
“Yes, exactly that.”
“If you’re not gay, what’s it matter?” Allender asked. “Calibrate her. Call her in, explain that you’re the boss and she is one of the working stiffs, as you call them, and tell her to knock it off.”
“Did that,” she said. “Since then I’ve been getting the wounded-doe act.”
Allender thought about it. He could sort of see it: Get a photo of the chairman with the thirty-something hottie, preferably something that at least looked intimate, and then get that back to the district to bolster the rumors. On the other hand, that kind of crap would hardly constitute a black swan—that was just standard election dirty tricks, and besides, outing a gay congresswoman was hardly the cataclysm it used to be.
“I don’t know this guy who’s taken Hank’s place, this Carson McGill,” she continued. “I’ve met him, of course, but he’s been the DDO so he’s not exactly a public figure and Hank made sure I dealt only through him. But, as I said, McGill’s the one who called me about the situation with Wallace. I felt something wasn’t kosher, so that’s why I grabbed the Bureau by the scruff of its righteous neck and threw it at Langley. Kicking and screaming, I might add.”
“But the Bureau works for Main Justice,” Allender pointed out.
“One of the Bureau’s most important missions is counterintelligence, which gives the intelligence oversight committee, namely me, the power to do that. Basically, I’m trying to keep Langley honest.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, I don’t see anything over there resembling progress. They haven’t really asked me for anything at all except some potential evidence saved from the autopsy.”
“Isn’t that kinda strange?” she asked. “You’re making it sound like they’re just sitting on their hands. Like they don’t take this situation seriously.”
Allender threw up his hands. “Beats me,” he said. “The woman leading the Bureau team is a loaner from Director Hingham’s stable.”
The congresswoman shook her head in bewilderment. Time to end this, Allender thought. She knows less than I do. He smiled at her. “Thank you for your time and for being straight with me,” he said. “I’ve obviously got a lot more homework to do. May I please contact you again if I think I’m getting somewhere?”
“You betchum, Red Ryder,” she said. “Here’s something you may not know. Being the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence I just might—might, mind you,—have access to some useful assets of my own. My AA out there will give you a number to call if you ever get into real trouble, okay?”
“Thank you,” he said, although he could not imagine what “assets” a House committee chairman could have. Besides, if he needed that kind of help, he’d call the Agency op center, not some congresswoman’s AA.
“One more thing,” she said.
“Yes, Madam Chairwoman?” he said.
“Can I see…?”
He thought about it for a few seconds. “Remember,” he said, as he got up and approached her desk. “You did ask.” He bent forward and took the glasses off.
“Holy. Shit,” she whispered.
“Just so,” he said. He stared down into her eyes until he saw the first nervous tic in hers. Then he put the glasses back on, thanked her again, and left. In the small mirror by the door he could see her sitting at her desk with one hand over her mouth.
He went down to the security office, showed them his newly minted Agency credentials and FBI building pass, and asked for a discreet way out of the building so that he could avoid prying eyes. A sergeant was detailed to take him to the tunnel connecting the Cannon House Office Building to the actual Capitol building. There he went down the white marble steps and then walked the four blocks over to Union Station. If there had been watchers outside the Cannon, of either persuasion, he should be clear of them.
He sincerely hoped.
Metro’s Red Line would take him directly back to Dupont Circle, where he would then have to decide whether or not to go into the Bureau. On balance, he thought he needed time to think, so probably not. If they needed him, they’d call.