15

Capitol Hill June 25

Damn ugly, she thought.

Lancette walked by the concrete planters placed behind the Supreme Court; it was as if they were designed by the city planners in charge of East Berlin during the communist years. Wasn’t there a less unsightly way to protect government buildings from foreign terrorists and made-in-the-USA antigovernment extremists? In recent years, these planters had sprouted throughout Washington like weeds. Streets had been closed, traffic rerouted, metal detectors installed in federal offices. Had anyone, she wondered, bothered to study the health effects of repeated exposure to those machines? Maybe we’re all being zapped to death by security precautions. A guard patrolling the perimeter of the court smiled at her. The Cold War done, and we need to hide behind half-ton plant holders. Go figure.

The genealogy room at the Library of Congress was empty when she entered and took a seat. It was near closing time. A note from a stranger and here she was at a secret rendezvous. Her very first. She wasn’t sure why she had decided to come. A change in routine? Curiosity? The possibility she’d get a story to tell out of this? Her family used to press her for details of what they imagined to be her clandestine exploits as a modern-day Mata Hari. But the only danger she had faced in the Agency came from office politics. The CIA, a paper-pushing bureaucracy? Who wanted to hear about that? But it was the Agency she knew. And no one had ever made a movie about that reality.

Lancette skimmed through a newspaper. On the front page was a photograph of mourners visiting Hanover’s grave. A story on the investigation reported that the inquiry was going nowhere. An editorial called on President Mumfries to announce soon whether he intended to run for reelection. A young man with a ponytail and a backpack walked in.

“Guy gave me a twenty to give you this,” he said, and handed her an envelope.

“Where is he?”

“Said not to say anything. Just tell you to read the note.”

She let a look of concern form on her face.

“Okay, okay, outside in the back, in a brown car.” He spun around and left the room.

That’s what the note said. It asked Lancette to meet him in the parking lot. It was not signed. In a penny, in a pound, she thought.

She exited the library. A car flashed its headlights. The guy from the gift shop was behind the wheel. The window next to him was open. The engine was on.

“Glad you came,” Charlie Walters said. “Sorry for the melodrama … the notes and all this.”

He was nervous. She stayed back from the car.

“But there are reasons,” he continued.

“Good ones, I’m sure,” Lancette replied.

Walters slid over to the passenger side.

“Please, get in for a moment. We can talk.”

“Long day behind the desk. I prefer to stand.”

Walters fumbled something he was holding and cursed under his breath. Lancette took a step forward to see better inside the car. He raised an arm. A gun was in his hand. Six inches from the tip of her nose.

“Please, get in,” he said. His hand was shaking. She thought about running, but she worried a sudden movement might prompt him to shoot. She opened the door and slid behind the wheel.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she said.

“Turn left when we leave the lot.”

“So what is this? A kidnaping? A rape? A new way to impress a girl on a first date? You should know that I left notes at home and at my office saying I was meeting you, just in case something happened.”

“You did not.” He waved the gun at her. “Drive.”

“Did too. Good tradecraft, isn’t it?”

“Then let’s hope they’re not paying attention to you yet.”

“Who?” she asked.

He poked her with the pistol, and she pulled the car out of the lot.

Lancette was surprising herself. She was not frightened. Walters ordered her to turn right and then right again.

“That’s a one-way street,” she said. “The other way.”

“Do it.”

She looked at him.

“That way you can tell if anyone is following,” he said.

“They teach you this?”

“No, saw it on television.”

She turned into the one-way residential street and toward the headlights of an oncoming car. A horn sounded. She veered to the right and the other car passed. Walters checked to see if anyone was behind them. A truck came toward the car. She swerved again. At the end of the block, she hit the brakes.

“Keep going.”

“Isn’t this enough?” she asked.

“Go.” He shook the gun.

At the next intersection, he instructed her to make a left and to return to normal traffic.

“All clear,” he said.

“I’m delighted,” she replied.

Walters directed her away from the Capitol, down Pennsylvania Avenue, and toward the dilapidated neighborhoods of Anacostia. Near the river, he told her to make a U-turn, pull over, and get out. He took the keys from her. They were standing in front of Wink’s, a windowless bar. The neon Budweiser sign over the door was not working. A hand-painted sign read, “Pool 50.” The gun was not in sight.

“A drink?” he asked.

“You’re crazy,” she said. “I should run.”

“You can. But if you care about … You should have a drink.”

This is not about fucking me or hurting me, she thought. It’s something else. She tried for a tough-sounding response.

“Okay … but you’re paying.”

Not quite, but close, she thought, as he opened the door to the bar for her.

Inside the bar was dark, the air smoke-drenched. She followed him to a booth in the back. Everyone stared. He sat with his back to the wall.

“I’m guessing they don’t get too many white patrons in here,” she said.

“That’s the point,” he said. “We don’t have too many black people to worry about.”

A waitress took their order. Two beers.

“Okay,” Lancette said. “You had your fun. You got me here. Anyone white walks in the door and we’ll know it. So what do you want?”

With his index finger, Walters drew small circles in the sticky film covering the tabletop.

“Really, it’s what you want—or wanted.”

“And what’s that?”

“An ICEMAN report.”

The front door opened; a shaft of streetlight sliced through the smoke. Walters raised a hand to block the beam. Lancette turned to see three black men in overalls entering.

“Doubt they could get anyone here that fast,” he said.

“They? You mean us?”

“Hard to think of it that way sometimes. Too many of us who are not us, you know. It’s a big place.”

“Okay, okay. The ICEMAN report. What are you talking about?”

“Listen to this,” he said.

Walters was a psychiatrist and worked in DA/MA/P. He had been with the Agency seven years. He joined it after a short stint as deputy head of penal research with the Michigan Department of Corrections. He spent his first two years at the CIA in the euphemistically named Occupational Health/ Behavior Rehabilitation office, the office that looked after the many agency employees who had become too familiar with alcohol and controlled substances. It was known throughout the Agency as Dry Out. Then Walters graduated from Dry Out to MA/P.

The morning after the President was shot, Walters received the ICEMAN request. It came in the standard form, containing a written physical description of the assassin and various photographs that Lancette had selected. Walters read the report and realized he possessed a clue to the most awful crime decades.

He had not recognized the man in the photographs. But the tattoo that was etched into the killer’s chest—the letter M pierced by a dagger—seemed familiar to him. He could not recall where he had seen it. Perhaps on an inmate in Michigan? He probably had stared at hundreds of tattoos there. Or on one of the hundreds of CIA people he had counseled, treated, interviewed, or screened? He was not sure.

The request for information was urgent, so he quickly wrote up a memo. It was short:

The undersigned believes he once encountered a person bearing a tattoo similar to the one found on the subject’s chest. (An arrow through an M.) The undersigned cannot recall where he saw the tattoo previously. But he believes there are two possibilities: (a) when he was working with inmates in Michigan correctional facilities; (b) when he was treating employees of CIA. The undersigned is trying to recall more precisely.

He carried two copies of the memo to the office of Dr. Stan Blum, the head of DA/MA/P. Blum was not there. Walters had the secretary, a new gal, initial both copies. He left one with the secretary, returned to his own office, and waited for interrogators to burst in.

No one came. That is, no one from the Office of Security, no one from the FBI, no one from Secret Service. Just Blum. Thank you for the report, he told Walters. It’s been taken care of. And if you think of whoever that was with the tattoo, do let me know. In the meantime, place your copy in the MA/P central files, so we can locate it if you’re not around. And, remember, you are not to discuss this matter with anyone. Not with anyone.

Blum left the office, and Walters knew—just knew—that his report no longer existed. He was scared.

That night—three days ago—Walters went home to his apartment in the Kennedy-Warren, the large residential complex on Connecticut Avenue. He rummaged through a box in his bedroom closet and found the journal he kept during the months he had worked for the state of Michigan. These were the notes for a book he once considered writing. For the first time in years, he read through all the entries, even the ones about the assault and attempted rape that had left him with an injured kidney and caused him to resign.

A Sam Cooke song started playing on the jukebox. Walters leaned closer to Lancette. “I am not a brave man,” he said. He drank his beer and resumed the story.

There was nothing in the diary about that tattoo. So he went to his storage room in the dank and cavernous basement. He kept two composition books in a crate. In these he had been recording—against regulations—his experiences at the Agency. Notes for another book, this one a novel.

The notebooks were a collection of key words and phrases, not a full-fledged account. The pages contained cryptic references meant to stir his memory later. “Couple/Art dealers/EE” referred to a husband-wife team of officers who posed as art dealers in Eastern Europe. Both were utter drunks. “Multiple fem/Sri”: a female case officer with multiple personality disorder who had to be extracted from Sri Lanka. She had been overseeing a penetration of a Chinese operation to procure restricted computer technology. At a meeting with an asset, the personality of an eleven-year-old girl had emerged. The asset bolted; the mission fell apart. “Nam/ twelve-year-old”: twenty-five years after serving in Vietnam, a former DO man who now worked in the credit union began having horrific nightmares about an adolescent agent he had recruited during the war. She had been killed in a free-fire zone.

Lancette waited patiently as Walters explained himself.

In the basement storage area, Walters had reviewed his notes. Toward the middle of the first book, he found the entry: “Outsider/Hotel/Exp. drug/The Gauntlet.”

It had been several years ago, after he had left Dry Out. His supervisor, Dr. Killigren, had introduced him to a man with one of those nondescript names: Mr. White, Mr. Brown, something like that. Go with him, the boss had said, and take our newest concoction. Killigren handed him a vial of pills and explained that the Agency had been experimenting with a new drug that in certain cases diminished the cravings of hardcore alcoholics. The medication had been cooked up, practically accidentally, at one of the labs of the Directorate of Science and Technology. The side-effects included impotence, dizziness, and profound nausea. The drug was being kept a secret from Dry Out. They’d go wild, Killigren had said, if they thought such an easy fix had been found. But his office had used it a few times, in discreet tests. Of course, it’s a secret from the FDA, Killigren said.

Mr. White—if that was his name—escorted Walters to a suite in the Rosslyn Marriott. The room was filthy. The air held a stench. A lamp was smashed. Jagged glass littered the carpet. Furniture was overturned, the bed linen soiled by bodily fluids. And a man was slumped in a chair watching a soap opera.

Walters’s guide explained to him that the semi-conscious fellow was a “friend” who had been through a rough patch. You could say we owe him, Mr. White remarked. Perhaps the pills.

This man needs more than a pill, Walters said. This is all we can do for him right now, Mr. White said. The man in the chair said nothing. He did not seem to notice that others had joined him in the room.

Walters shut off the television set and sat in front of his subject. Can you tell me what happened? he asked the man in the chair. No, Mr. White said. No questions. Tell him about the pills.

This is ridiculous, Walters thought. The fellow was barely awake. He studied him. A week-old beard, thick wrists, unkempt, thinning brown hair, a scar on his ear. One eye was shut tight, and he held something in his hand. As if to explain, the man opened his fist. In his palm was a glass eye. He placed it back within his eye socket.

He wore combat boots, an unbuttoned leather vest over a bare chest, and a baseball cap bearing an emblem that read “The Gauntlet.” What’s that? Walters defiantly asked, pointing to the words on the hat. The man in the chair blinked repeatedly; he coughed.

Place where I work—sometimes, he mumbled.

Enough, said Mr. White. Explain the pills.

Walters reached into his pocket and removed the vial. These pills, he said, will cut down on your desire to drink. Not erase it completely but make it less. They block the interface between the alcohol and the chemical receptors in your brain.

The man’s eyes began to close. Walter’s escort shook the fellow in the chair; the eyes opened.

Walters went on: One in the morning, one at night. If you experience dizziness, a decline in sexual appetite, stomach troubles, you should contact me immediately. Here’s my number.

Walters wrote it down on a piece of hotel stationary. He looked at Mr. White and realized he would never hear back from this person. He held out the container of pills. The man leaned forward to take the vial, and the flaps of his vest separated to reveal a tattoo on his chest. It looked like an M pierced by an arrow.

Okay, let’s go, Mr. White said. He patted the man in the chair and turned on the television. You take care, he said. See ya later.

In the hallway, Walters protested. The man in the room clearly required more than a poorly tested drug. Sometimes a little is the absolute best we can do, Mr. White said, and, to tell the fucked-up truth, this guy is damn lucky. Doesn’t look it, but damn lucky.

Walters never saw Mr. White again. He never saw the man in the chair again. He never heard from him. A few days after the visit, he asked Killigren if he could conduct a follow-up session. Some meetings never really occurred, Killigren told him. Walters tried to argue, invoking medical ethics. It’s hard to be a doctor in the dark, Killigren said. But if that’s where your patient is …

Lancette realized she had scraped the label off her beer bottle. She gathered the pieces and placed them in the plastic ash tray on the table.

“In retrospect, seems hard to believe that I didn’t right away remember the tattoo,” Walters said. He sipped his beer. “But there have been even odder days.”

An Aretha Franklin song blared from the jukebox.

“Ever find out what the Gauntlet was?” she asked.

“No. But then I never went looking. I told you, I’m not a brave man.” He emptied his glass.

“And it was a dagger through an M?”

“Something like that. Can’t swear it, but … .”

“And the photographs—none looked like the man you met in the hotel room?”

“Not that I could see. But did that Max Bridge guy have a glass eye?”

Not as far as Lancette knew. But you could never be sure that all information was being shared.

The door to the bar opened, and light fell upon Walters’s face. Lancette saw concern in his eyes. She looked over her shoulder. A black man and a white man had entered. They sat at the bar.

“When was this?” Lancette asked.

“Little over four years ago.”

“And that was it? Period? Done?”

“Like I said.”

“And no one has asked you about your ICEMAN report?”

“No one.”

The white man left his seat and passed Lancette and Walters on his way to the men’s room.

“And how did you find me?” she asked.

“Too easily, I have to say. A friend in Security—helped him after his son committed suicide. I asked him about ICEMAN reports. He told me about you. Then I asked Mrs. Novek about you. She really does know everyone. Told her that I was, well, interested in meeting you. You know what she’s like. A wonderful coincidence, she told me. You had an appointment with Wenner that day. She called me when you were finishing the meeting, and I found you in the gift shop.”

“Sounds like quite the coincidence.”

“Coincidence sometimes do happen.”

“I have to tell myself that every day.”

“And another coincidence. Today I was ordered to Burundi. Seems one of our colleagues was found in the embassy communications room naked and delusional. I asked for more details. They told me that the chief of station would brief me on my arrival—tomorrow. Feels like I’m in a bad movie, you know. A cliché. The guy with the clue who …”

The white man passed them as he returned to join his friend. Another pair of men—black and white—entered the bar and sat with the first two.

“Coincidence or not?” Walters asked.

Lancette glanced at the men.

“Time to go,” he said.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“Whatever you think you should. I just had to tell someone. I’m not doing anything more.”

“And if I want to contact you?”

He quickly wrote his number on a napkin and passed it to her.

“They say I’ll be back in a few days. But keep an eye out for that headline: State Department Officials Die in Bujumbura Car Crash.”

He tried to laugh but instead a clicking sound came out of his throat.

“We should leave separately,” he said. “There’s an alley in the back. I checked it out earlier. We’ll get up. I’ll head to the men’s room. You go out the front, like you’re going to wait for me outside the door. If they’re here for us, they’ll wait for me to come out of the bathroom before they move.”

“And then how do I get home?”

“They have cabs up here.”

The two stood, and Walters dropped money on the table.

“Do you have a copy of your memo?” she asked.

But Walters already was heading toward the back.

“I’ll wait out front,” she called after him.

The men at the bar looked at her without moving their heads. She opened the door and left. Across the street, a woman was huddled in the entranceway to a boarded-up building. Next to her was a pile of cardboard boxes. Two little feet stuck out of the boxes. The feet of a child? Lancette wondered.

Lancette flagged a taxi.

“Toward Arlington, please,” she said.

“Sure,” the cabbie said. He was a young fellow. Armenian, she guessed. She looked for his license. It wasn’t displayed.

“What you doing up here?” he asked, as the cab cruised toward the illuminated dome of the Capitol.

“Seeing a friend.”

“A friend?”

Questions, she thought.

“The address?”

“Just head straight for a little.” She stared out the window. The cab descended Capitol Hill.

“You know what,” she said. “Forgot something in my office. You can let me off here.”

The cabbie came to a stop by the Rayburn House Office Building. He asked if she wanted him to wait. She said no, handed him six dollars, and stepped out of the cab. She walked toward the entrance to the building. When the taxi pulled away, she changed direction and headed to the Metro.

In the station, she sat on a stone bench. She was alone on the platform. Must have just missed a train, she thought.