An hour after they’d made it back, Rebecca reappeared in the tower study. Her clothes still showed faint traces of powder, but she’d been able to shower and generally recover from her experience in the utility room.
“Feeling better?” he asked as she plopped down on the sofa.
“Much,” she said. “You look a little pale around the edges.”
“Not trained for that shit,” he said. “My hands can still feel that bullet hitting the extinguisher.”
She nodded. “Training helps, but your instincts were spot-on. Thank you. I think we’re even.”
Hardly, he thought, but couldn’t think of anything clever to say.
“I need to get back to the Hoover Building, though,” she continued. “May I use the phone? Lost mine in the scuffle.”
“Sure about that?” he asked. “We’re still operating in the mushroom mode here. Did that woman want something specific?”
“She yelled at me in what I assume was Chinese, almost like she expected me to understand what she was saying. You know, like some tourists do—shout, like that’s going to make the locals understand?”
He nodded. “But with gun in hand, right?”
“Yep,” Rebecca said. “Jammed right into my side. Queasy-nine, standard issue in the People’s Liberation Army.”
“MSS, then,” he said. “Interesting that she was operating alone.”
“General Chiang have a daughter?” she asked.
“Not sure,” he replied. “She got really excited when you got up from the table—blasting away on a cell phone while she hurried after you. There was another guy who seemed interested, too—a black man in a UPS uniform. I don’t know if he was with her or someone else, or if he was even involved. And then I discovered that McGill had me up on a ceiling security camera right there at the table.”
“Eyes everywhere, then,” she said. “Probably out front as we speak.”
“McGill scolded me for telling Greer that Hank was not, in fact, dead and gone. Said he needed to red-team the new situation. Told me to go home and stay there. That he’d definitely be in touch.”
Rebecca shook her head. “I need to get to my team and synch up,” she said. “The Union Station cops’re gonna find my phone, so E.T. really needs to call home. You’re welcome to come with me if you think a grab team’s spooling up.”
“I don’t get it,” he said. “I just don’t get it. What the hell is McGill up to?”
Rebecca was on his desk phone by then. She told whomever she was talking to where she was and that she needed a pickup to get her back to the Hoover Building. Then she hung up.
“I’ve got to alert the Bureau to what went down at Union Station,” she said. “Then I think we need to lay actual eyes on Wallace, assuming he really is alive. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to stay put. See what McGill does.”
“I can get you somewhere safe,” she offered. “The Bureau’s good at protecting people.”
“What’s the point?” he sighed. “I’m no operator.”
“You sure looked like one to me when you popped her,” she said. “Especially when you fired that extinguisher.”
“Actually, she did that,” he said. “When she shot at me and hit the extinguisher, instead. And she didn’t hesitate for one instant. I opened that door and she opened fire. If I hadn’t been holding the fire extinguisher chest high she’d have had me.”
“I see,” she said, and then got up and gathered her things. “It’s probably a good idea for you to stay put, then,” she continued. “I’m going to brief the deputy director at the Bureau. I assume McGill will be talking to Hingham as soon as he gets word of this latest incident. Did you see that flash, by the way?”
“I did,” he said. “That woman I wounded took off down toward the tracks concourse. I wonder if she tangled with a third rail.”
Rebecca made a face and then headed for the front door. Allender went with her. When he opened the door, a government car was waiting out front. “That was fast,” he said.
“They’re nothing if not efficient,” she said with a quick smile, and then she was gone.
He went back to his study, sat down at his desk, and took the protective glasses off. “Eyes everywhere,” she’d said, as he rubbed his. “Probably out front,” she’d said, as if she’d known. He was seriously beginning to wonder about Rebecca Lansing, the “unlisted” Agency liaison officer dispatched from the Hingham’s office. “That what she told you?” McGill had asked. He realized he didn’t know the first thing about Rebecca, other than whatever legend she’d been spinning for him.
On the other hand, she’d certainly saved his ass from the Chiang crew. He could still feel the bits of bone, brain, and blood spraying over his face. But what exactly had brought her and her shooter out into the night and to his house at exactly the right time? As he recalled, she’d kind of brushed it off when he asked her, claiming Yang Yi had warned her. But why her? How would he even know who she was unless he’d asked someone inside the Hoover Building? And, finally, she’d said that that Chinese agent today had wanted something from her and apparently expected her to understand Mandarin. What did that tell him? He hadn’t a clue. Maybe he needed another Scotch. He looked at his watch. Early, but his hands were still trembling. He realized that a lot of his so-called power at the Agency had been utterly useless when someone swung around in front of him and opened fire.
He wondered if he shouldn’t just grab some clothes, his passport, one of his guns, and some emergency cash and then just get in his car and leave town. Nobody would expect him to do that, because they knew that he knew that Washington was one big surveillance grid these days. Silent drones everywhere, cell phone traps across the entire spectrum, every building with a security force on duty twenty-four hours a day. They could track his phone and probably his car. He’d have to get past a zillion surveillance cameras just to get down to one of the river bridges.
McGill had told him to go home and stay home. If he bolted and they had to chase him and pick him up, wherever they took him wouldn’t be as comfortable as sitting right here, not to mention that McGill could decide to send some people who knew how to engineer a fatal accident. A year ago he would have dismissed the thought, but since coming back to work he’d faced two occasions where people were willing and even anxious to kill him. Maybe even three, if he counted McGill. Except it had been McGill who folded him into this circus. WTF?
For his entire career, he’d been the one in control. Now he was being pushed around a chessboard he couldn’t see by people he didn’t know, and it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. He wondered if the people who’d had to come to see him once a year had felt the same way when he applied some of his talents to explore their thinking. Payback is hell, isn’t it, he thought.
Another Scotch. Definitely. Then a shower and a change of clothes. Something to eat. Yet another Scotch, even. He got up, went into the kitchen, and tried to set the security system. The screen was blank and the system unresponsive. He swore and made a mental note to get a dog instead of a cat.
* * *
That night, after a dinner that involved microwaving a defenseless cardboard box filled with some mystery meat, he went back to the tower study to think. The phone rang.
“Doctor Allender,” a woman’s voice said. “We need to talk.”
“Do you have a name?” he asked, although the voice sounded vaguely familiar.
“Virginia Singer,” she said.
“And why do we need to talk, Ms. Virginia Singer?”
“I think you are in danger,” she said.
Me, too, he thought. “From whom or from what?”
“Carson McGill,” she replied. That got his attention. He sat up in his chair.
“What do you know of Carson McGill?” he asked.
“I’m getting out of a taxi one block from your house,” she said. “Let me in and I’ll explain.”
“I’m not accustomed to letting strangers into my house, Virginia Singer.”
“Tell you what, Dragon Eyes,” she said. “Once I come in, you can ask me to disrobe if you really have to.”
He was stunned. “Melanie?”
“It’s Virginia for now,” she said. “Open the goddamned door, please. I think there are eyes out here.”
* * *
“You look—gorgeous,” he said, as he let her in. “Princess Grace.”
“Scary, isn’t it,” she said. “How’re you fixed for gin?”
He laughed and took her into the tower study. She was wearing a silver-gray pantsuit and he thought she’d lost weight since the last time he’d seen her. Maybe it was part of the new persona. “I don’t have Bombay,” he said. “Tanq do?”
“Absolutely.”
“Have to be straight,” he said. “Tonic water’s gone flat. Ice?”
“Please.”
He handed her the gin, looked at his own wee dram and decided to hold with that. He then sat down. “Spill,” he said.
“I saw you in Greer’s office the other day,” she began.
“Oh, right, yes,” he said. “I saw you. Wondered at the time who you looked like, but, then, I was kind of busy.”
“Me, too,” she said. She told him about the Agency position in Greer’s office, her training at the Farm, and then her assignment to “almost” tantalize Greer into initiating a homosexual advance.
“Almost?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Ah,” he said. “You’re the one.” He then filled her in on what Greer had told him about the woman from the Agency coming on to her.
“Total bullshit,” she said, shaking her head.
“Excuse me?”
“Her not being gay. She’s a full-fledged bull dagger and she came on to me the second day I was there. In fact, on my first day there, one of the girls in the office warned me to watch out, that Greer was an absolute predator. You know Capitol Hill: hundreds of good-looking women everywhere. Those congressmen don’t hire the fatties and the uglies.”
“Wow,” he said. “I believed her.”
“She’s a snake,” Melanie said. “When I took on the assignment, I told my instructor down at the Farm that I wasn’t going there literally, so they trained me up to being a woman who didn’t know she was a lesbian. Apparently, that’s like fresh liver to a catfish.”
“Interesting simile, for a city girl,” he said.
“I dated an outdoorsy guy for a while at school when I couldn’t stand the academics anymore. He liked to fish the rivers around Boston, especially for catfish. He’d sell ’em in certain parts of town in return for weed. Regardless, she’s still a snake. She invited me to lunch in their private dining room, and then to a dinner function at State. I played the naïf, which apparently just whetted her interest. She’d stand too close, run a hand down my back while talking to someone else. I would blush and shiver, and then move away and do some bosom heaving.”
He shook his head. “They have a course for this at the Farm?”
She laughed. “You should have seen the guys in training.”
“All gay guys?”
“No!” she said. “All straight guys. Pretending. Walking that fine line.”
“But why not—?”
“Yeah, why not? I asked that question. My instructor, Gabby Farrell, told me that that would mean the Agency was exploiting an employee’s sexuality, which would be unfair.”
“The Agency, exploiting an employee,” he mused with a totally straight face. “What a concept.”
“My thoughts, exactly,” she said, glancing over at the bottle of Tanqueray. He saw the look and refilled her glass. A pain-filled year in LA will do that to you, he thought.
“So your assignment was to get Martine Greer into a compromising position and then ‘out’ her in some fashion?” he asked.
“Mister McGill said he would disclose my assignment in pieces,” she said. “First, confirm she is what she is. Then, additional instructions to follow. That’s where it stood when I saw you and the FBI lady come into the office. My turn: I thought you’d been mustered out.”
He told her the story of McGill’s original call and his being brought back in to “help” the Bureau while the Agency solved the mystery. He explained who Rebecca Lansing was as well.
“Mister Wallace is dead?”
“Not exactly,” Allender said. He told her the rest of it.
“So all this started because of something Hank Wallace was up to?”
“That’s the original story. Right now, I’m not sure about any of it. Of course, I didn’t really have many dealings with Wallace when I was active. He knew who I was and what I did, but I don’t think the training directorate was high on his priority list. You know, counterterrorism über alles. When I got fired he did promise to warn me if he detected any funny business aimed at me after the black-swan debacle. Told me to remember what the seer said to Caesar about the ides of March.”
She shook her head. Then she spotted the fighting knife.
“What is that?”
“That is a hudiedow, an antique Chinese fighting knife,” he replied, picking it up. Then he told her about the incident upstairs, and how Rebecca had brought in the cavalry at just the right moment. “And then she called in an Agency team to do the wet cleanup.”
“Let me get this straight: This Lansing woman is an Agency operative from Hingham’s private stable working in the Bureau headquarters to find out how a senior Agency director has been offed? And you’ve been recalled to active duty to work on her team while surreptitiously slipping nuts and bolts into the gear train to run their investigation off the tracks?”
“Knew you were smart,” he said. “It gets better.”
“I think I need more gin.”
He gave her a short splash before continuing. “So: today. After seeing Greer, Rebecca and I went to Union Station for breakfast and a kick-around.” He told her about what had happened next.
“Both times, you—and Rebecca—and hostile Chinese?”
“Yeah, interesting, isn’t it.”
“This is the black swan,” she said. “Coming home to roost.”
“Well, Chiang’s son certainly put it that way and there’s no way that team could have come into the United States, made it to Washington, and got into my house without the embassy MSS office knowing, if not actively aiding and abetting.”
“We-e-l-l,” she said. “Getting into the United States these days isn’t exactly difficult.”
“Yeah, but: These guys weren’t desperate wetbacks crossing the Rio Grande. My guess is they came in through one of the West Coast ports, but here’s the thing: Chiang Junior escaped from prison over there. The regime had executed his father and destroyed the family. The regime’s ambassador over here would not be helping someone like that.”
“So if not them, who?”
“Yes, that is the question, isn’t it.”
“Shit,” she said. “I’m getting cold feet about this Greer assignment. Tell me, when you first came back on board, McGill wouldn’t brief you on the whole mission, either?”
“No,” he said. “Now: You said you thought I was in danger, and presumably without knowing anything about what’s been illuminating my life lately. What gives?”
“When I came back from LA, I got stashed in Hingham’s office. I then got my marching orders from McGill himself which is kind of unusual. I’m a junior operative; he’s the freaking DDO. So when I saw you in Greer’s office, I put a call in to his office. Got one of his aides and told him I’d seen you in conference with Greer. He listened and then said, disregard. I said okay and went back to work. Same guy called back an hour later. Said it was a friendly heads-up. Told me to stay far away from you, that you were radioactive, and that measures were in motion.”
“‘Measures were in motion’?”
“Too many B-grade movies, I guess, but the message was pretty clear. That’s why I called. Having heard what you’ve had to say, I think I was right.”
“How’d you get my number?” he asked, suddenly curious.
“I kept it,” she said. “Was I wrong to do that?”
There were a thousand possible meanings behind that question, he thought. “Absolutely,” he said. “Terrible breach of professional protocol. Junior operative stalking a senior Agency retiree. A really senior retiree. And old. And decrepit, too. The universe trembles.”
“That bad,” she said, with a sly grin.
“Without a doubt,” he said. “But I’m glad you’re here. That shit today? The way that woman whirled and fired without a second thought? Chinese killers in my house, past all my security systems? I’m somewhat out of my comfort zone these days.”
She hooted at his use of the term “comfort zone.” Then her expression sobered. “I get that,” she said. “We young spooks are at the very least subconscious adrenaline junkies, as I think you pointed out a while back. Your gig was more along the lines of a top-drawer mind fuck, which is not what you bring to a gunfight or a knife fight.”
He nodded. “You get complacent when everyone around you agrees to be afraid. General Chiang’s son put a different perspective on things when he described his father’s execution. I’m glad you’re here, Melanie.”
She looked down and smiled. The phone saved him.
“Rebecca?”
“Doctor,” she replied. “I know it’s late, but we need to talk, and not on the phone. May I come over?”
“Certainly,” he said.
“Twenty minutes,” she said.
“That long? I would have thought maybe sixty seconds.”
She laughed. “This time I’m driving.”
It was more like a half hour when Rebecca showed up. Even after normal working hours, getting through downtown traffic could still be torturous. She blinked when she got a look at Melanie. Allender made introductions, and they all went into the study. Allender asked Melanie to tell Rebecca what she knew and why Carson McGill had sent her into Greer’s office in the first place. Rebecca listened carefully but without any questions, which for some strange reason gave him the impression that maybe she already knew all of this.
“Okay,” Rebecca said. “Here’s the deal. I sat down with FBI deputy director Green after the incident this morning. At that time I didn’t know that Greer had been lying to us. I did report the Chinese woman in Greer’s car. He immediately made the same assumption you did—that the Chinese woman could be an operative for the MSS. I pointed out that she could also just be a car pool. As to Greer’s sexuality, his response was ‘who cares’. That said, the fact that she has been concealing it might give someone leverage, especially if she’s facing a contested election.”
“Well,” Allender said. “McGill certainly has an interest. He threatened me after he found out that I’d told Greer Hank Wallace was probably still alive.”
“Exactly,” Rebecca said. “As I’ve told you, I’m based out of the Agency director’s office. But: Having been seconded to the FBI, I feel as if my loyalty belongs to the truth, not necessarily to the Agency. Especially if the DDO is targeting a sitting member of Congress. Director Green flat-out asked me the question: whose side was I on with this cluster.”
“And?” Allender prompted.
“I told him two things. One, if McGill has cranked up an attack on a congresswoman, even one as obnoxious as Martine Greer, he needed to be stopped and prosecuted. But, two: I can’t imagine he’d do that without the knowledge and tacit approval of the Agency director.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said that’s what he thought, too, so he was going to order the Bureau to break off any further interaction with the Agency and convert the investigation to a major governmental corruption case. And if I wasn’t comfortable with that, he would send me back to Langley, and the Bureau would go after McGill on its own.”
“You understand the implied threat in that, don’t you?” Allender said.
Rebecca nodded. “If I’m not part of the solution, then I’m part of the conspiracy. Yeah, I get that.”
Allender took off his glasses and leaned forward to stare hard at Rebecca. “And which are you, Rebecca?” he asked softly.
She was obviously uncomfortable under that his stare but she held her ground. “I’m on the side of law and order,” she said. “Are you going to ask McGill’s operative here the same question? Who is she, anyway?”
Allender saw Melanie begin to bristle. “She came to me,” he said, putting his glasses back on. “Tell me, what does the Bureau want from me, if anything?”
“They don’t really know what you are or who you are,” Rebecca said. “I think they want you to stay out of it entirely. Especially since McGill sent you in the first place.”
“More than happy to oblige,” he said. He turned to Melanie. “You want to work with the Bureau on this? You could be hugely useful to them if McGill still thinks you’re his asset.”
Melanie sat silent for a long moment, then turned to Rebecca. “Let me tell you who I am,” she began. She described her education, her government career before the CIA, and then her brief career as a Clandestine Services officer, including an operation that later required her to undergo a little over a year of unpleasant cosmetic surgeries to look the way she looked today. “Then I was brought back to Langley, stashed in Hingham’s office for a month, and then sent for training at the Farm for this Greer mission, and, yes, by Carson McGill. And for the record, Doctor Allender, I’ve never seen this woman at the Farm or at Langley.”
Rebecca was taken aback, but then nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Fair enough. I was never part of CS. I came to the Agency during the previous director’s tenure. I got my undergraduate degree from Columbia in business administration, and my law degree from NYU. I then applied to the Bureau, went through the academy, and then was sent to the New York field office. My specialty was a hybrid form of forensic accounting—in other words, serious fraud. It was interesting work, but the Bureau was a little too stovepipe for me, so then I applied for a GS position at the Agency. I’m not an operative, per se, but with my Bureau training, I can mix operational experience with financial and legal analysis, which is why I’m now a GS-15.”
“Impressive,” Allender said. “Columbia. NYU. You must have come from a wealthy family.”
Rebecca laughed. “No,” she said. “Well, in a way, I suppose. My mother won the lottery in my sophomore year in high school. Took home six million. Divorced my deadbeat father and then told me the sky was the limit, as long as I worked my ass off. Which I did.”
Melanie looked at her for a long moment. “Here’s the thing, Wonder Woman,” she said. “You say you work for the director. We both know that Hingham is nothing more than an idealistic dilettante masquerading as the director of the CIA. So I’m sorta curious: What do you do there?”
At that moment, Allender stood up. “Enough, ladies,” he said. “This pissing contest isn’t getting us anywhere. Rebecca, I think you should proceed on the side of the FBI. If this ever gets to the level of a national investigation, you want to be working for the investigators. My role in this mess is over, as far as I’m concerned. Melanie, I think you need to go to Congresswoman Greer in the morning and lay out the truth of why you were sent there in the first place. The DDO is a powerful man in the Washington intelligence hierarchy. Greer is equally powerful. When the elephants dance, it’s best for the ants to get the hell out of the way. Ladies: I bid you good night.”
Rebecca and Melanie exchanged hard looks and then got up. Rebecca hesitated and then asked Melanie if she needed a ride. Allender could see that Melanie wasn’t that keen to accept any favors from Rebecca. “You two need to reach neutral ground,” he said. “Say yes, Melanie.”
“Okay,” she said. “But—”
“Great,” Rebecca interrupted. “I agree—we’re not on opposite sides here. This whole thing might be a whole lot bigger than any of us knows, and that means that when it gets exposed, we peons will be the first ones thrown under the bus. C’mon. I don’t bite.”
The two women walked to the front door. Melanie gave Allender an “are you sure?” look over her shoulder as she followed Rebecca out. He mouthed the words “call me” at her, and then closed the door.