27

Mars’s phone rang right after he’d gotten back to the apartment from the office.

He picked up the receiver while he read the note that had been left on the kitchen counter

Clean, it read. Your place and Nettie’s. We’ll do the office tomorrow. Below the message was a scribble that Mars recognized as Danny Borg’s signature.

“Hello,” Mars said into the phone, thinking about the fact that Danny’s note had given him a flash of relief that was surprising. His mind was wandering to what he’d be feeling if Danny’s note had read dirty when Boyle Keegan’s voice came through the receiver.

“I’m downstairs. Beam me up, Scotty.”

Mars pushed the buzzer to release the lobby door, then opened his own front door and waited for Boyle.

Mars heard him before he saw him. Boyle was huffing as he came down the hall. He was a big guy, six-three, six-four. Tall enough to be an NBA point guard, if he’d had a mind to shoot hoops. And meaty. Thinning, wild reddish hair. A flushed face that revealed many truths about Boyle, including that all by himself he drank more than would have been good for four adult males.

Mars stepped out into the hall to greet Boyle, and was too surprised by how Boyle looked to even say “hello.”

Boyle carried a duffel bag in one hand, a couple of fishing rods in the other. He wore a squashed-down fabric hat that was covered with fishing flies, and one of those vests with four hundred zippered pockets.

“You really are going fishing?” Mars said.

Boyle lifted a finger to his lips. Then, as he dropped his gear on the hall floor and moved to the kitchen, where he started taking apart Mars’s phone, he said in a booming voice, “You’ve got your shit ready? I’d like to get started first thing in the morning.”

Mars took the pieces of his phone from Boyle and held up Danny Borg’s note. “The apartment was swept this afternoon, Boyle,” Mars said.

Boyle was immediately relieved. “So. You got my message. I mean, you got the message. It was a little subtle, I have to admit, but I thought I could count on you.” He started moving through the condo, appraising what he found.

“Shit. I wish I’d known you’d got a clean sweep before I spent a thousand bucks on all this fishing crap.”

“A thousand bucks?” Mars said, incredulous.

“You don’t fully appreciate how stupid people are until you see how much they pay for stuff like fishing gear, ski gear, all that junk. Don’t worry about it. I can take it back. Just that it’s a nuisance dragging it back and forth on the plane.”

He turned around in the living room.

“This is great. You know why? You haven’t ruined it with a bunch of useless furniture. I knew my first wife and I were headed for court when she bought this thing called an—oh, hell, I can’t even remember what you called it. Some fool French word. A shelf tower thing is what it was. Then, after she buys this shelf tower, she’s gotta go out and buy a bunch of crap to put on the shelves. Crap you’re never going to use for anything. It just sits on the shelves. Then she’s gotta hire someone to clean the house because there’s so much crap to dust and whatever. That was when I told her. This isn’t going to work. She got all the crap in the divorce settlement, which was fine with me. With my second wife, I told her up front: no French shelf towers that you’ve got to hire someone to dust.”

“I didn’t know you were still married,” Mars said, thinking about Boyle’s evident interest in Nettie.

“I’m not,” Boyle said. “What I found out second time around is that a French shelf tower is just one of a lot of things that can go wrong in a marriage.”

Boyle stopped his tour of the apartment and slapped his forehead. “Shit again,” he said. “I forgot. You don’t drink. You keep anything for guests?”

“Well,” Mars said, “we had some dead-cat-infused ice cubes, but I think we’re out of those. Other than that…”

“Point me toward a liquor store that sells single malt whiskey,” Boyle said, “and order pizza. Thin crust, sausage and pepperoni for me.”

As he left, he said, “Nettie joining us?”

“Now that I know you’re here, and what’s on the menu for dinner, I’ll give her a call.”

*   *   *

“Surdyks’ is a great liquor store,” Boyle said as he came back in with a narrow brown bag under one arm and a twenty-four-can pack of Classic Coca-Cola dangling from his other hand. “My single malt was three bucks cheaper than anywhere I could get it in D.C.”

He spotted Nettie in the kitchen, dropped the beverages on the counter, and gave her a bear hug. “I’m a happy man,” he said, “good liquor and the company of a beautiful woman. It’s all I’ve ever asked from life.”

They sat in the living room, Boyle and Nettie on the futon couch, Mars on one of the collapsible Target fabric chairs, pizza boxes and a roll of paper towels on the floor between them.

Boyle didn’t want to talk about why he was there until they’d finished the pizza. Then, tearing off a sheet of paper toweling and wiping his hands, he said, “I’ve got a lot to tell you about your Senator Campbell and his Marine sniper. But I’m going to start at the end, because I don’t want the two of you to miss how serious this thing is you’ve gotten yourselves into.”

They looked at each other, then back at Boyle.

Boyle considered what he was going to say before he said it. Then he gave them each a direct look.

“When I first heard what I’m going to tell you, I didn’t believe it. I thought it was part and parcel of all the noise that passes for fact inside the D.C. beltway.

“Then, last summer, something someone in the administration said about a war with Iraq got published. No doubt you heard it. This administration guy was asked about the possibility of the U.S. going to war with Iraq in August. And his response was, ‘You don’t roll out a new product in August.’”

Doyle picked up his whiskey bottle, poured himself a generous splash, took a deep, wincing gulp, then set the bottle back down.

He belched, loudly and without apology, then said, “After I heard that, I started believing what I was hearing.”

Nettie said, “And what you were hearing was…”

“Let me tell this my way,” Boyle said. “It’s a complicated story, and I don’t want to miss the important parts.

“Number one. I can’t prove anything I’m about to say is factual. I’m basing what I’m going to tell you on what I’ve been told by people I respect, people who’ve had their feet on the ground in a lot of different places for a long time. Then I’ve done a gut check on what I’ve been told, processing it against my own experience. So I’m not going to tell you anything that I think is completely off the wall. What I tell you is, in my judgment, plausible to one degree or another. But do I know for certain what I’m going to tell you is true? No.”

Boyle looked at each of them. “Understood?”

Mars and Nettie nodded, without having a clue what they were agreeing to.

“What really complicates this picture is that you’ve got the CIA splintered into guys who’ve left and aren’t happy about how they left, you’ve got guys still in the CIA who feel like they’re getting dumped on for everybody else’s mistakes, and you’ve got the FBI which has been the principal government whipping boy—deservedly so—over the past fifteen years…”

There was something on Mars’s and Nettie’s faces that told Boyle they were having a hard time figuring out where he was going.

“Bear with me. I need you to understand the context. If you don’t get the context, you’re not going to understand your own risks.”

They both shifted their positions as if hunkering down for what was to come. Boyle took that as his signal to continue.

“The bottom line in this context is that we have chaos at the highest levels of the government’s security community. And do you know what chaos breeds?”

Mars and Nettie took Boyle’s question to be rhetorical, which it was. They waited for him to go on without saying anything.

“Chaos is the red flag of opportunity for clandestine activity. And clandestine activity is what we’ve got in spades on the most sensitive political mission this country has undertaken.

“Capturing Osama Bin Laden.”

Boyle drew a deep breath.

“That said, let’s get to the nut of the issue—why the context I’ve just described matters.

“Boys and girls, there is not one hunt for Osama, there are three.

“One is the official hunt. This is the hunt that gets coverage on CNN. The official hunt involves special forces troops crawling through caves in Afghanistan. All this with official cooperation from the CIA, the FBI, and so-called assistance from the Pakistani and Saudi Arabian governments.

“The second hunt is made up of mercenaries associated with foreign governments and a few former disaffected CIA operatives. This group has people in Karachi, Damascus—in other words, their search is not where the official search is concentrated. Their motive is to find Osama to either embarrass the U.S. government or to trade Osama for concessions the sponsoring governments want from the U.S.

“The third hunt is much like the second, but different in motive and different in terms of sponsorship. The third hunt is headed up by Campbell’s pal. The Green Man. He has his own intelligence sources and his people are principally in Pakistan and Syria. At the highest levels, there is probably Saudi involvement. I could speculate on the connections between the Green Man’s hunt and specific individuals inside and outside the administration, but it doesn’t serve any purpose to do that…”

Mars held up both hands. “Whooooa. I know you want to tell this story your way, Boyle, but back up a little. Why shouldn’t there be three hunts? A hundred hunts for that matter…”

Boyle stood, jamming his hands in his pockets, walking around the room without looking at Mars and Nettie.

“You’re right. I guess I didn’t make that clear. It doesn’t matter how many ways we try to get Osama. What’s wrong,” he said, turning to face Mars and Nettie, “is that the ‘official hunt’ is bogus. It’s chewing up resources—read lives and taxpayer dollars—and it’s being fed intentionally misleading intelligence. We are spending millions of dollars every day to make sure we don’t find Osama. Worse than that, we’re playing with the hopes of people whose lives have been devastated…”

Nettie got up and started to pace. “Now you’ve lost me. You’re saying someone in the administration doesn’t want to find Osama? How is it possible that this administration—any administration—wouldn’t want to get him? That they’d waste resources the way you’re suggesting?”

“Oh, they want to get him, all right,” Boyle said, “but they want him gotten on their timetable. Remember: ‘You don’t roll out a new product in August.’”

It took Mars and Nettie a minute to think through what Boyle was saying.

Boyle said, pronouncing each word slowly, “Timing is everything. The Green Man’s hunt group wants to ‘roll out’ the capture in a way that will be most beneficial politically. My sources say that would be announcing Osama’s capture in 2004. The closer to the election, the better.

He let his words sink in. Mars was on his feet now, almost bumping into Nettie as he paced.

“I just don’t see how it would work,” Mars said. “You’re saying they’ve got Osama but they’re holding him until a year from now—more than a year from now?—how are they going to keep something like that quiet? For that matter, what’s to keep Osama from speaking up when their captures are announced?”

Now Boyle sat down, stretching his legs in front of him. “You need a footrest or something,” he said, not looking satisfied with his position. “One of those whatever you call it. A hassock. You need a hassock.”

He shifted forward, drawing his legs back.

“Look. I said it before. What I know for sure is a lot less than what I don’t know. I don’t know if they’ve got Osama yet. And I don’t know what their strategy is for announcing the capture when and if they do get him. But I’m a betting man, and I’d bet that when Osama gets rolled out, there’ll be wheels on his coffin. At that point, there could be a hundred explanations for why the body isn’t warm. That’s the easy part, really. And there’s another reason why the administration wouldn’t want Osama captured alive. There’s talk that there will be a court challenge at some point to the United States’s authority to extradite war criminals for prosecution in the U.S., particularly if the war criminals are captured by paid operatives. Anyway, my point is, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that Osama is going to have a pulse when his capture is announced.”

Mars said, “What about Saddam? Is he part of the political strategy?”

Boyle held up both hands in a gesture of uncertainty. “That I can’t say. When I first heard the story about the Green Man’s hunt, it only involved Osama. But that was before we went into Iraq. Before Saddam was part of the equation. And now? Before the insurgency started, I would have said timing the capture of Saddam would be part of the political strategy. Things going the way they are now in Iraq, I think they’re going to have to get Saddam when they can. The political costs of not getting him, with our troops on the ground there getting hits every day, are just getting to be too high.”

Boyle took another deep draw on his drink. Then he gave Mars and Nettie a hard, cynical smile.

“Like I said. Timing is everything.

“And now is the time to tell you about the Green Man.”

*   *   *

Boyle refilled his tumbler with whiskey. He stared at the glass, swirling it gently, before he spoke again.

“The Green Man showed up on intelligence radar for the first time during the Vietnam War. He made himself useful. To people who counted. He started with the Marines, went into Special Forces at one point—but eventually, even Special Forces were too structured for him. He freelanced mostly, then and now. Still making himself useful to people who count…”

“What’s his name?” Mars said. “His background?”

Boyle looked tired, disinterested in Mars’s question. He sipped his whiskey, then said, “The thing about the Green Man is that it’s very hard to sort out legend and reality. He went to Vietnam as an enlisted man. Even before he went to Vietnam he used aliases. I could tell you the name he enlisted under, but that doesn’t tell you any more—probably tells you less—than just calling him the Green Man. His history follows that name. It does seem clear that he picked up the ‘Green Man’ in Vietnam because…”

“Because he was a sniper and always wore green body paint,” Mars said. Then he told Boyle what Jim Baker had told him and about what Mars and Nettie suspected about Campbell’s and the Green Man’s involvement in Andrea Bergstad’s disappearance.

Boyle nodded when Mars had finished talking. “Fits,” was all he said, still looking vaguely bored. He was quiet for a time, then he said, looking more alert, “This Baker. Who’s he told about what happened in the Khe Ranh Valley?”

“Nobody,” Mars said. “He was clear about that. The conversation he had with me was a confessional.”

“Make sure he keeps it that way,” Boyle said. “And make sure you keep it that way. Don’t tell anybody what you know about the Green Man. Not your other colleagues, for sure not anybody on The Get List. The Green Man gets a whiff that somebody’s onto him and you’ve got big, big trouble.”

Boyle clutched his right hand into a fist, and extending his index finger toward Nettie and Mars, said, “The Green Man is the reason you don’t have to worry about anyone telling about when the capture takes place. The Green Man will make sure there’s nobody left to embarrass his clients. That’s how he’s defining completing his contract.”

Mars shook his head. “Global issues aside, Boyle, this is a problem for us back here in fly-over land handling our picayune cold case. We don’t have anything on Campbell. To get Campbell, we have to use his connection to the Green Man. That’s our only chance to resolve our cold case.”

Boyle sat forward. “Damn it, Mars. A girl who’s been dead nineteen years isn’t worth putting your life—Nettie’s life—at risk. Back off. If you can find a way to work your cold case without getting close to the Green Man man, do it…”

Nettie said, “He won’t try to protect Campbell? I mean, Campbell must have been his client…”

Boyle shook his head. “The Green Man doesn’t care shit about Campbell. He is scrupulous about meeting the terms of his contracts. Once he’s delivered on a contract, the relationship—his responsibility—ends. As a matter of fact, nobody cares shit about Campbell. As bad as the Green Man is—and I’ll tell you more about just how bad he is—there’s something kind of noble about the guy. Campbell is a sleazebag. Everybody knows that and there isn’t anybody who isn’t ready to throw Campbell overboard if he becomes a problem. Matter of fact, you’d be doing your state and your country a public service putting Campbell away. So you can get as close to Campbell as you want. Just don’t do anything—anything—that puts Campbell and the Green Man together.”

“And you’re sure the Green Man is working for the side that wants to conceal the capture of Osama,” Mars said.

Boyle said, “What motivates the Green Man is a challenge, the ability to work independently. The clandestine operation is his style. It’s harder to pull off. And he probably knows the official search is bogus. His intelligence sources are always better than anybody else’s.”

“No political motives?” Mars said. “Moral quests?”

Boyle guffawed. “God, no. Remember back in the eighties when some of the big banks were in up to their eyeballs with bad loans to South America? What I heard was the Green Man went down there and talked to key people. Told them to pay on the banks’ terms or he’d stop insulin shipments to the country. For a while he ran an operation that involved ‘harvesting’ organs for transplants. Donors—including slum kids in third world countries—didn’t survive, but…”

Mars was beginning to understand why Boyle had been blasé about the Green Man’s actions in the Khe Ranh Valley. “I’m having a hard time putting ‘noble’ and the Green Man together in the same sentence,” Mars said.

Boyle made a motion of indifference. “If the Green Man said he was going to do something, it was done and it was done right. In his world, that’s a kind of nobility. When he came back from Vietnam he had an ‘asset conversion’ business. Converted illegal drugs and diamonds into cash for all kinds of clients for all kinds of purposes…”

“And his clients were?” Mars said.

“Anybody who could afford his fees and who could offer him a challenge. Never more than six clients, sometimes only one or two. He has to be his own boss. ‘Plays well with other children’ never showed up on his report cards.”

Boyle shifted. “This is the part that connects to your case. What do you know about Alan Campbell’s first political campaign?”

Mars and Nettie looked at each other, shrugging.

“Nothing,” Mars said. “First I heard of him was when he was running for the Senate, around the time Andrea Bergstad went missing.”

“Campbell’s first campaign was for Congress. Ran against a very popular incumbent. All that Campbell had going for him was a rich daddy, his war record, and a good haircut. Then his opponent was killed in a car accident…”

“Campbell got lucky,” Nettie said.

Boyle shook his head.

“No,” Boyle said. “Campbell got the Green Man.”

Boyle nodded toward Mars. “I don’t know what the Green Man’s original connection was to Campbell—probably Vietnam. After you called and said you needed to talk to me about Campbell and a Marine sniper, I knew from what I’d been hearing for years that the sniper had to be the Green Man.

“So, before I came out here I checked with a couple people. They told me, based on deep background intelligence reports, that the Green Man continued to have a connection to Campbell after the war. At least up until the time that Campbell ran for Congress in the mid-seventies.

“I didn’t ask about the Bergstad situation because I didn’t know about it. But it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to believe that Campbell was having a problem with the girl and called in the Green Man to take care of it.”

Nettie said, “Like he did with Campbell’s first political opponent.”

“Exactly,” Boyle said. “What my source told me is that Campbell’s opponent had a flat tire on a rural road one night. The accident report said he was struck by a passing car. Nobody in the intelligence community believes that. They believe the Green Man shot the tire out, shot Campbell’s opponent, then staged the accident with the other car…”

Mars let out a wail. “Erin Moser,” he said as Boyle and Nettie stared at him.

“Erin Moser didn’t get unlucky,” Mars said, “she got the Green Man.”

*   *   *

Boyle stood up after Mars told him about what had happened to Erin Moser.

“How much more do you need to know to convince you that you’ve gotta stay away from this guy?” Boyle said.

Mars shook his head. “It’s just hard to think that Andrea—Andrea and Erin—will never get justice because we know what happened, how it happened…”

“Your choice,” Boyle said, “but unless you and Nettie can find a way to nail Campbell without involving the Green Man, you better prepare yourselves to become a couple of cold cases yourselves.”

*   *   *

Mars invited Boyle to stay the night, but Boyle was restless.

“Nah,” he said. “I’m getting out of here on the first plane that’s going anywhere. And I’m leaving as soon as the two of you promise you’ll back off on this. You’re smart enough to figure a way to get Campbell without coming near the Green Man.”

At the door he said, “The good news is your apartment wasn’t bugged. If it had been, I’d say you were already in over your head. That it wasn’t bugged says the Green Man doesn’t have you on his radar yet, even with The Get List program. Or if you are on his radar, he doesn’t think you’re getting close to him. All that noise about a sexual predator trolling convenience stores probably convinced him you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. And that’s what’s saved your butts. Keep it that way.”

*   *   *

“Let’s go for a walk,” Mars said to Nettie after Boyle had gone. “I need oxygen.”

They walked through the soft summer night from the apartment, down Nicollet to Orchestra Hall, not talking much, each of them preoccupied with what Boyle had told them and what it meant for their investigation.

Reaching the plaza next to Orchestra Hall, they sat down on a bench and talked randomly about their choices, neither of them willing to give the case up—or willing to go forward until they better understood their risk.

“What I don’t understand,” Nettie said, “is how the Green Man decided to go after Erin Moser. I guess what I’m saying is that I’d like to understand how he targets people. It might make me feel a little less jumpy.”

The same question had been half formed in Mars’s mind. Erin had died almost three weeks after Andrea had disappeared. Why then? It only took a moment’s thought after Nettie’s question before Mars realized he knew the answer.

And it was only another moment before he realized that Sig Sampson had made a fatal error in the investigation of Andrea Bergstad’s death.

“Let’s go back to the apartment,” Mars said. “I’ve got some of Sig Sampson’s case files locked in the trunk of the car. There’s something I want to check.”

*   *   *

Mars went to the file that included news coverage on Andrea Bergstad’s disappearance. He found the article he’d remembered. The article that said Sig had refused to comment on whether or not Erin Moser knew the identity of the last person entering the One-Stop before Andrea disappeared.

With hindsight, it was obvious Sig had given an answer that put Erin at risk. Mars knew how Sig would feel knowing that now.

What Mars also knew was that it was an answer any officer in that investigation, at that time, would have given.

For that matter, when Mars had first found out that Erin had died after Andrea had gone missing, he hadn’t questioned the conclusion that her death was an accident. He had to acknowledge that he hadn’t wanted to consider the possibility that it wasn’t an accident. If it wasn’t an accident, it meant that his theory that there was a sexual predator taking advantage of lax security at convenience stores didn’t work.

Mars put his head in his hands as he thought about how he’d let his passion to prove a point about convenience-store security blind him to other possibilities.

Fool.

Mars checked the date of the article.

Two days after that date, Erin Moser was dead.

“What do we do now?” Nettie said, as chastened by what Mars had found as he’d been. “I just don’t see that we’ve got anything on Campbell without the Green Man. We’re still stuck with a can of soup, a golden oldie, and an unfired rifle cartridge.”

Mars left the file with the news clip open on the table, walked over to the sliding doors, and stared out the black glass at the unseeable night. He remembered Jim Baker’s phrase “severe dark.”

Severe dark. That pretty well summed up where they were.

“It’s what I’ve been thinking about this case since I got Boyle’s message,” Mars said. “I think we’d better be sure about where we’re going before we actually leave.” He blew air, taking a little kick at an invisible target on the carpet.

“I think we need to take some time before we move ahead.”