“The DDO will see you now, Doctor,” the pretty young assistant announced breathlessly, as if just amazed that it was all happening.
“Thank you,” he purred, squinting against the afternoon sunlight flooding the DDO’s outer office. Allender was there to call upon the deputy director for operations, Carson McGill, the third most senior official at the Agency. He wondered what had happened to Caroline Haversham, an aging career administrator whose encyclopedic knowledge of where the Agency’s bones were buried had made her a formidable person within the Agency. As a gatekeeper, she’d had no peer. Probably moved up when Hank Wallace had taken over as deputy director of the entire Agency, he thought. She would have scared the pants off of Carson M. McGill, who’d been DDO for three years now. This bouncy little number would have made Caroline laugh out loud.
J. Leverett Hingham III, director of the CIA, mostly faced outward, engaging daily with the highest levels of executive power in official Washington, including the president himself, as long as that worthy was so inclined. Not all of them were. The Agency’s deputy director, now Hank Wallace, ran the Agency administration from within, dealing with budgets, organization, congressional relations, the principal department heads, and internal bureaucratic issues. The deputy director for operations was just what his title implied; he directed the Agency’s entire gamut of clandestine operations, both offensive, which was intelligence collection against America’s enemies, and defensive, known as counterintelligence, against those same enemies’ own intelligence agencies. In effect, he was the spymaster for the entire Agency.
By all outward appearances Carson McGill was an unlikely-looking spymaster. For one thing, he was a natural-born fat boy. There was no other term for it. He was of medium height, balding with a grayish fringe, and evoked the word “round” at first sight. Round face, double chins, a respectable belly inevitably encased in a straining vest, short arms and legs, soft, twitchy hands, and unusually small feet. He had the voice to match: high-pitched, tinny, with what passed for an aristocratic if pedantic New England accent. He was one of those Yale graduates whom you’d expect to actually come out with a Boola-Boola from time to time.
Underneath all that public softness, however, was a totally different animal: cunning, smart, and capable of effortlessly keeping several operational balls in the air at any one time. He was known to hold career grudges and to act upon them when vulnerabilities presented themselves, especially if that would help his own prospects. He was thoroughly disliked in the upper echelons of the Agency and yet universally respected as a player—a dangerous player, but always a player. Allender had often wondered what it was about this man that attracted young women, if the rumors could be believed, but he’d made it a cardinal rule to never underestimate Carson McGill.
Ordinarily, Preston Allender, consulting psychiatrist and Agency interrogation specialist, wouldn’t come into contact with the DDO himself. Minette thought that he, Allender, might be running an operation. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He was providing some specialized support to whatever McGill and his people had in mind for General Chiang by choosing the best possible candidate for someone to execute a black swan. As usual, the DDO wasn’t sharing details with a consultant, even a quasinotorious one like Allender.
“Preston, my dear fellow, come in, come in,” McGill chirped from behind his overlarge desk. “Do sit down. Tell me something interesting—I need an antidote to all this”—he pointed theatrically to the large number of folders and briefing books scattered over his desk—“secret stuff.”
“I think I’ve found our swan,” Allender said.
“Ooh, goody,” McGill said, rubbing his hands together. “What does she look like—is she deliciously pretty?”
Allender fished in the leather folder he’d brought along and produced an eight-by-ten black-and-white picture of Melanie Sloan standing in front of his desk. He was amused to see McGill’s eyes go wide. “How in the world did you get a picture like this?” he exclaimed. “She’s—she’s, well, stark naked! And, oh my God, is that your office? You didn’t!”
“It is, and I did,” Allender said, extending his hand to retrieve the picture. McGill took one last, longing look and reluctantly handed it back.
“Does she know that exists?” McGill asked.
“She was told that there were no cameras in my office. The point of the exercise was to see if she could disassociate her body from a mission. At first she refused outright, but then she came back—on her own volition—and agreed to disrobe. Carol was present if that makes you feel better.”
“Good Lord,” McGill said. “And she’s his type?”
“He’s apparently an omnivore when it comes to his sexual pleasure,” Allender said. “I arranged for him to get a glimpse of her at a restaurant down in Williamsburg. He was playing tourist with his wife and grown children, but he noticed her, and since she was with me, and the Farm is right there, he’s probably made the appropriate association with the home team.”
“That’s right—I forgot. He would know who you are.”
“Which was the point of our ‘date.’”
“What’s next, then?”
“Training,” Allender said. “I have her with Minette de LaFontaine and also the Chinese cultural conditioning people.”
“I so remember Minette,” McGill said, fondly. “If anyone can amp up an operator’s sexuality, she can.”
“Precisely,” Allender said.
“Excellent, indeed,” McGill said. “I’ve decided to direct this one myself. We’ll have an ops cell here in town, a senior controller, of course, and the appropriate mechanics, but not for long. I propose two encounters, one to really whet his interest, one to execute the exposure.”
“That’s rather quick, isn’t it?”
“My people tell me he doesn’t indulge in long romances. He likes sudden, exciting encounters. Fancies himself a predator: I see it, I want it, I take it. Then on to the next one. I’ll give him a few days to vet her between encounters, but he’ll have to do that locally. Beijing Center would never allow such a liaison; they’re already tired of his philandering, but, as we know, he’s too connected for them to recall him.”
“Surely he or at least his people will suspect a honey trap,” Allender said.
McGill leaned back in his chair. “He has a methodology around that,” he said. “His last conquest was the assistant secretary of the air force for gender assimilation or some such bullshit. She was a lawyer, unhappily married, and something of a cougar on the prowl. He encountered her in a hotel exercise room and apparently it was on after about a half hour of strategic bending in the spa. He’s just that impulsive, and thereby gets more ass than a toilet seat. But this time I’m going to double down. Sloan’s going to tell him she works for us. That she’s important, some kind of superspy, high up in the Agency, and that it’s all very secret what she does.”
Allender snorted. “And he will believe such bullshit?”
“Of course not. Universal rule: The more senior you are, the less you ever reveal about yourself. That’s why I’m going to give him time to make a quick vetting, but not too much time. His people will verify that she is, indeed, an Agency employee. I’ll have her name and picture stashed in a discoverable, low-level clerical research position in S and T, so she’ll end up sounding like some ambitious airhead with a great body and hot pants. Just his style.”
Allender smiled. He liked it. “When?” he asked.
“First face-to-face contact in three weeks. Second and strike will come three, maybe four days later. Timing is negotiable, of course. They’ll first meet at a dinner sponsored by the IMF right here in town. I’ll have them placed across the table from one another or something. You’ll be there, too, sitting near her and this time, ignoring her utterly. It will buttress the legend. They know you’re senior. That should confirm that she is not.”
“And the second time?”
“The second time will be at the Wingate during the Global Warming Conference awards banquet. The strike will occur in a suite of rooms we control there, ones that look like something she could afford.”
Allender absorbed all that. “You know,” he said, “when you first brought me into this operation, I had some doubts, until you called it a black swan. What a wonderful name—and connotation. A Chinese general of intelligence. Family ties to the Central Committee. His own network. Exposed in such a dramatic way. A black swan indeed! Why not a fancy suite?”
“She’s a nobody, but she wants him, so she’s sprung for a single right there at the Wingate hotel. Even that costs seven hundred dollars a night. He will have had his people check her out. A suite would fairly scream setup. Keeps her in character right up to the last moment.”
Allender nodded. Hearing all this made him regret that he hadn’t ever gone into operational counterintelligence, especially since the final stroke here, which he’d kept from McGill, had been his idea.
“Have you briefed Himself?” he asked.
McGill made a face. “Why ever would I do that, Preston,” he said. “The last thing J. Leverett Hingham III, would want to know are the details of what I’m about to do to General Chiang. You know how he feels about China.”
Allender did. Everyone in the Agency did. Hingham was purportedly one of the Boston Brahmins whose family had been in New England at least since God had invented rocks, and if you didn’t recognize that right away he would be sure to tell you all about it. He had “the” accent, the proper clothes, the obligatory private school and university education, and a studiously haughty demeanor. He was slender and tall enough to pull it off, being able to look down his long, bony nose at all the little people while trying to think of something to say to them that would be sufficiently droll. His appointment to head the Agency had come as a shock to the rank and file at Langley, because he had zero national security experience. For that matter, he had zero governmental experience, being a privately funded academic and homegrown philosopher. His only qualification had apparently been that the sitting president had wanted someone at Langley who shared his own distaste for and distrust of all things concerning national intelligence.
Previous directors of the Agency had all been serious players of one level or another. Hingham, in contrast, was the penultimate gilded figurehead. Whenever senior staff had to meet with him he would inevitably treat them to long-winded discourses on the insurmountable forces of history that inevitably rendered the efforts of mere mortals utterly insignificant. As in, specifically, trying to compete with or control the destiny of the most populous nation-state on earth. The Chinese were an inherently superior race of people, according to him, and their ultimate hegemony was pretty much foreordained. As to the eternal turmoil in the Middle East and the dangers that conflict posed to the United States, Hingham thought that it was just Sturm und Drang, simply further evidence of the friction that necessarily occurred as a result of the tectonic struggles for world domination between America and everyone else, especially China. By all means we need to quash the myriad attempts at terrorism here at home, but only if we recognize that we are all, as a people, and as an agency, sweeping against the Oriental tide.
The thousands of people who staffed the Agency headquarters took one long look at Hingham and then turned to the Agency’s deputy director, Henry “Hank” Wallace, to become the default chief executive at Langley. Hank Wallace had been the number two at Langley for almost twelve years. Prior to that he’d been a senior executive overseeing the US Secret Service. He was perfectly suited to running the show while trying his best to cocoon Hingham in his fancy executive suite, known Agency-wide as the Ivory Tower. The fun part was when they sent Hingham to Congress to testify for the Agency’s annual appropriations and authorization bills. It was said that only a fire could clear a hearing room faster than J. Leverett once he got going on one of his ether-lipped lectures. The only small comfort that the career spooks at Langley could take was the sure knowledge that the Chinese security services were so paranoid that they would spend years trying to figure out what the Hingham appointment was really all about.
“Okay,” Allender said. “That reads. I’ll be in touch.”
Once finished with McGill he took a motor-pool sedan to the nearest Metro station, and, from there, rode the Metro subway to the Dupont Circle station in lower northwest Washington. If he’d chosen to stay in the sedan it would have taken over an hour in Washington’s atrocious commuter traffic; from the Dupont Circle station it was a five-minute walk to his home.
Allender lived in one of the larger town houses on Massachusetts Avenue near Dupont Circle. Three stories high and architecturally a bit pretentious, it was faced with actual brownstone instead of one of those extravagant color schemes decorating its neighbors on either side. Enhancing its desirability was a turreted tower at the right front corner. An uneven brick sidewalk, rumpled by the roots of two large maples, proclaimed its great age. Two tiny patches of struggling ivy flanked the sidewalk inside a wrought-iron fence. Three rounded stone steps led up to an oversized mahogany front door. The gate screeched when he opened it, which Allender thought appropriate, given its age. When he unlocked the door he was greeted by an enormous Maine coon cat named Horrible.
He went through the living room to the tower study, where he dropped his briefcase, kicked off his shoes, liberated two inches of single malt from a decanter, and then sat down in a leather recliner. The study took up the first two floors of the house, with a spiral staircase wrapping around the room up to a landing. From there a doorway gave access to the top, attic floor of the crenellated tower, which he’d had converted to a rooftop atrium. A stack of circular bookshelves lined the two-story wall above the top of the windows; one could stand on the staircase at any level and rotate the nearest shelf to bring the book of choice to hand. He had a large rosewood desk, a computer station equipped with a secure phone, and some unobtrusive file cabinets embedded in the walls. On the floor was a circular Persian Tabriz rug measuring twenty feet in diameter. There was a cat bed under the computer desk for Horrible.
He actually liked living alone. The woman who lived in the town house on one side ran a high-end domestic cleaning service company. She had a crew come in every other week to clean and polish, much to Horrible’s vocal annoyance. Two gay decorators owned the house on the other side, which they had restored to a glowing Victorian masterpiece inside. As far as his neighbors knew, Allender was a senior bureaucrat in the HEW Department who had something boring to do with training. He’d learned how to cook while growing up in Taiwan and frequented the two very good Chinese markets that were in walking distance. Otherwise he’d simply go out, having nothing better to do with his salary.
Sipping his Scotch, he thought about Melanie Sloan. He didn’t think the op would be too dangerous unless the general himself lost it and pulled a gun. Even then, he had the sense that Melanie would be equal to the occasion anytime someone started some shit. She had a tough streak in her, a willingness to stand her ground that belied her extraordinary good looks, probably because she was older than the conventional newbie in the CS. He found himself interested in her as a woman, a thought which he immediately clamped down on, based on painful past experiences. Not for you, old son, he reminded himself.
* * *
After fixing himself a Chinese concoction for dinner, he threw Horrible out for the night, gathered a Borsalino hat and a walking stick from the hall closet, and went out for his evening walk. Living alone meant rather more food and whiskey than was healthy, so on most nights he would go out after dark and walk, sometimes for miles, around the so-called Federal area. It kept him trim and in good cardio health, and he enjoyed watching the city transform once the sun went down.
As a consultant, as opposed to an operator, he was not authorized by the Agency to carry a gun. Walking in Washington, D.C., at night, even in the monuments district, had its risks. Once the thousands of commuters slipped back into their surrounding county suburbs, a different population emerged from the shadows, so Allender had equipped himself with a custom-made Burger walking stick that contained a twenty-inch-long stainless-steel sword. The local Metro police would certainly have considered it an illegal concealed weapon, but his Agency credentials offered considerable protection from intruding civilian police forces.
In all the years he’d been night walking, he’d never once had to bare that blade, but it was still comforting to have it along when the homeless, the drug addicts and their suppliers, small groups of teenagers on the prowl for some “action,” or just run-of-the-mill drunks appeared. Ever since 9/11, the Mall and the parks surrounding the White House had become comprehensive surveillance zones, which had the benefit of deterring the carjack and holdup gangs from the area. The cars one did see still parked along the Mall often had federal police in them, and every major federal building had rooftop surveillance teams or at least extensive camera coverage. He was convinced that all the watchers by now knew who he was, because he’d rarely been stopped by an unmarked patrol car and asked for identification or the purpose of his being out there at night, wearing a suit and a Borsalino and carrying a twelve-hundred-dollar walking stick.
Tonight he walked down Mass Avenue to Connecticut Avenue, thence down Connecticut to the White House tourist plazas, out onto and across the Mall, up the Mall to the Capitol building, and then back to intercept Mass again, and back home. Labor Day had come and gone, and there was a hint of fall in the night air. He’d seen a few sketchy characters along the way, but to them he looked like bait in a Metro street-crime division sting net. The Mall was pretty much empty now that all the hordes of tourists were back in their hotels. The white marble monuments and memorials towering overhead all seemed grateful for the reprieve, and his only company was the grounds crews making a final trash sweep or tending to irrigation systems. An entire herd of tour buses was parked along the Mall perimeter, their windows beginning to fog up as the night air cooled.
It would have been a nice night to have had a lady friend on his arm. Someone like Melanie Sloan, perhaps. He sensed she’d be a handful and a half, but when he’d looked into her eyes down there at the Residence bar, the emotion that he’d detected had been excitement and not the usual sudden apprehension he was used to. She’d left State for the Agency because she’d been bored, and a stint at the embassy in Lisbon probably hadn’t provided the kind of nights one might expect in, say, Moscow. Her brief fling with the station chief had ended, at least according to her, with the same equanimity as it had begun. Would she really be interested in him? Or was it the usual case, that his fiery eyes and all the stories about mind-bending interrogations simply intrigued her? Face it, Dragon Eyes, he told himself. These are questions you’ll never answer.