Echo of War Page 3

  “Quiet, Pumpkin.”

  Crohn’s heart pounded. He gulped air, took another step. Pumpkin tugged at her leash. Crohn pulled her back, took another step. He drew even with the wall and raised the stick. He peeked over.

  “Oh, good God …”

  A man lay sprawled beside the hedge. As though sensing Crohn’s presence, the man swiveled his head toward Crohn and rasped, “Help … get help.”

  Crohn’s panicked call to 911 was routed to the nearest Wicomico County sheriff’s deputy, who was performing DWI stops outside Catchpenny twelve miles away. Eight minutes after receiving the call, Deputy Jay Meriweather pulled onto the gravel road bordering the flagstone wall. Headlights picked out a man frantically waving one arm as he tried to rein in a dog with the other. Meriweather stopped the car, radioed “on scene” to his dispatcher, then got out. “Sir, did you—”

  “He’s there … on the other side of the wall.”

  Meriweather glanced at the wall. His hand instinctively went to the butt of his gun. “Calm down, sir, and tell me what the problem is.”

  “There’s a man there. He’s hurt. I didn’t … I couldn’t …”

  “All right, sir, just stay put.”

  Flashlight held before him, Meriweather stepped up to the wall and shined his light on the ground. As Crohn had described, the man lay on his left side in the grass. His face was covered in blood. An embroidered patch on the shoulder of his windbreaker read, “Rhodes Point Security.” Though Meriweather had seen only one gunshot wound before, the ragged hole over the man’s eye was unmistakable.

  He grabbed his radio. “Dispatch, Victor Two-nine. I need backup and rescue at my location. Ten thirty-three!”

  Meriweather’s call of “Officer needs emergency help” drew every available police unit, from fellow sheriff’s deputies, to nearby local cops, to a Maryland State Trooper on patrol nineteen miles away in Salem. Accidental discharges notwithstanding, gunshot victims were a rarity in this wealthy part of Maryland’s eastern shore.

  Once the property was cordoned off and the security guard was bundled into an ambulance, Meriweather and five other cops divided into pairs, then climbed over the wall and began a search of the grounds.

  Meriweather was approaching the pool patio when his radio crackled to life: “We’ve got a body—north side by the dock.”

  Another call: “Here, too. Main gate.”

  “Make it four,” came another. “Sidewalk, by the front door.”

  Jesus Christ, Meriweather thought. If there’s four out here, how many inside? “All units, find an entry point and stand by. Break: Dispatch, Victor Two-nine. Get me a supervisor out here. Break: All units, enter house.”

  The interior search went smoothly. The Cape Cod’s lower levels were cleared. There were no signs of forced entry, nothing out of place, no signs of struggle—and no more bodies. Meriweather led the other officers up the stairs.

  On the second floor he found a bathroom and two bedrooms. Using hand signals, he directed the other teams to take the bedrooms as he searched the bathroom. He was approaching the threshold when one of the officers called out.

  “Meriweather! End of the hall!”

  Meriweather rushed down the hall and into the bedroom. Lying on the bed under the glare of four flashlights was a man in his late sixties or early seventies. He was bound hand and foot with plastic flexi-cuffs. His mouth was stuffed with a red ball-gag. Wide-eyed, he stared at them and mumbled into the gag.

  Meriweather stepped through the circle of cops, loosened the ball-gag, and removed it.

  The old man let out an explosive whoosh, then gulped for air.

  “Sir, are you injured?” Meriweather said. “Can we—”

  “My wife,” he panted. “They took my wife!”

  Seventy-five miles away in Gloucester point, Joe McBride was enjoying one of his favorite hobbies: late-night vintage horror movies. Tonight he’d lucked out and found the 1960 Vincent Price version of The Fall of the House of Usher. As far as McBride was concerned Price was the king of what he liked to call “creepy campy.” Humor and terror all in one.

  The phone jangled on the end table. McBride started, nearly spilling his popcorn. He glanced at the clock: three A.M. Who the hell … “Yeah, hello.”

  “Hey, Joe, it’s Charlie Latham. Sorry to call so late.”

  “Charlie … Jesus. You scared the hell out of me.”

  “Lemme guess: Horror movie?”

  “Yep—House of Usher.”

  “Good one. Listen, we need your help.”

  This caught McBride off guard. He knew Charlie from having worked with the FBI on several cases, but they’d never worked together. Latham’s bailiwick was counter-espionage; McBride’s, kidnapping. “Who does? You?”

  “No, the higher-ups. They know we’re friends, so—”

  “They thought you’d have more luck getting me to say yes.”

  “That and lure you out this late at night.”

  “I’m retired, Charlie.”

  “Consultants don’t retire—they just take longer vacations.”

  McBride chuckled. “What’s going on?”

  “A big one, something up your alley. We’ve got an agent on the scene who’ll explain everything.” McBride hesitated. There was some truth to Latham’s jibe: Being freelance, he could slip into and out of retirement as he chose, and he’d done so several times in the past few years. That was the problem with doing what you loved for a living: What was the point in retiring?

  “Okay. I’ll take a look,” McBride said. “No promises.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “A little town called Royal Oak on Maryland’s eastern shore. A helicopter will be waiting for you at Fleeton.”

  McBride hurriedly got dressed and drove the thirty miles up the coast to the Fleeton airstrip. As advertised, a Maryland State Police helicopter was waiting, its rotors spinning at idle. The pilot stuck his hand out the window and waved him aboard. Five minutes later they were airborne and heading east across the bay to Whitehaven, where they landed in a farmer’s field. From there a Wicomico County sheriff’s deputy drove him three miles to the scene.

  Through the wrought-iron gate McBride could see a dozen unmarked and marked police cars lining the driveway to the two-story Cape Cod. Figures milled about the open front door. McBride could hear the overlapping crackle of radios and murmured voices. Yellow police tape fluttered in the breeze along the stone wall.

  McBride felt that old familiar swell of excitement in his chest. He took a deep breath to quash it. Big case, big stakes. Retirement be damned. Still, there was part of him that wanted to turn around and go home. Exciting as they were, kidnapping cases took their toll on him, dominating his every thought and emotion until the case was resolved—and sometimes beyond that when things finished badly.

  McBride had come to the “hostage talker” business largely by accident, having stumbled into it during his junior year at Notre Dame as he watched a police negotiator secure the release of three bank tellers taken during a robbery gone awry. This one man, standing in the midst of a dozen armed cops, a coked-out and twice-convicted felon with nothing to lose, and three hostages who didn’t know if they would live to see their families again, had turned an impossible situation into a miracle. The robber went to jail and the hostages went home to their loved ones.

  The next day McBride changed his major to criminal justice.

  To fund his undergraduate degree in psychology, after Notre Dame he joined the army reserves and trained as an armored intelligence scout. On those weekends he wasn’t bouncing around inside a Bradley fighting vehicle, he made pocket money by giving golf lessons at nearby courses and flipping steak at a local diner.

  Time flies, Joe thought. From short-order cook to free-lancer for the FBI and the CIA. Time had also brought him some unexpected gifts, including a wonderful wife and a pair of sons—Joe Jr., a radio
logist in Oklahoma, and Scott, an attorney in Ohio. Life was good—for him at least, watching the cops milling around the driveway. Something bad had happened here tonight. The question was, could he do anything to make it right? One way to find out.

  The deputy escorted him to the front door, where he was met by a man wearing a blue blazer. An FBI badge dangled from his front pocket. The agent extended his hand to McBride. “Collin Oliver.”

  “Joe McBride. You’ve got every cop within fifty miles here. What the hell happened?”

  “Three dead security guards, one who’s probably on the way out, a bypassed alarm system, and a missing woman. A neighbor walking his dog found one of the guards and called it in.”

  “The husband?”

  “He’s inside. Shaken up but unhurt.”

  “Any calls yet? Anything left behind?”

  “Nothing.”

  McBride frowned. “Agent Oliver, I’m not sure why I’m—”

  “You’ll see. Come on.”

  Oliver led him inside, through the living room, and into the kitchen. An elderly man with disheveled gray hair sat at the dining table. He stared into space, his hands curled around a steaming mug. Standing a few feet away a pair of State Troopers nervously shuffled their feet.

  Oliver stopped in the doorway and gestured for McBride to wait. He walked up to the man, whispered a few words to him, then gestured toward McBride. The man looked in McBride’s direction then nodded.

  The face looks familiar, McBride thought. As he tried to place it, Oliver waved him over.

  “Joe, this is the owner of the house, Mr. Root.”

  Root … Jonathan Root. That was it, that’s why he looked familiar, McBride realized. Jonathan Root was the former director of the CIA. Oh boy.

  Root looked up at him. “You’re McBride?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ve got to help me. They’ve got my wife. They told me they’ll kill her.”

  3

  Tunis Mills, Maryland

  Even before Vetsch began recounting the few details he had of Susanna’s disappearance, Tanner had made his decision. There was nothing to think about, really. He was Susanna’s godfather; she his surrogate daughter. Gill could not go after her himself—which was tearing him apart—and Tanner refused to simply sit back and hope for the best. Even so, there were arrangements to be made before he could do anything. His work complicated matters.

  Not long after resigning his commission with the Navy and leaving ISAG, Tanner was approached with an offer by his late mentor, Chief Boatswain’s Mate Ned Billings. Billings was a part of a quasi-civilian intelligence group called Holystone. Run by Leland Dutcher, a former deputy director of intelligence for the CIA, Holystone was what is known in the espionage business as a “fix-it company,” a small collection of special operators and intelligence gatherers who handled the riskiest of jobs.

  Pitched to Dutcher by then President Ronald Reagan in the early eighties, Holystone was designed to address a blank spot in the U.S.’s intelligence community—namely, a group that could follow bad guys into the gray areas where military action was too much, diplomacy was too little, and standard intelligence measures were indefensible—in other words, a group that worked by “deniable methods.”

  For Holystone, this arm’s-length relationship with the CIA and its many spinoffs was both a blessing and a curse. Due largely to Dutcher’s universal reputation as the most even-keeled and trustworthy DDI of his generation, Holystone operated with a fair amount of autonomy, both in budget and in methods. It also operated at a fraction of the CIA’s cafeteria allotment, had full access to the U.S. intelligence system, and was exempt from the political and budgetary squabbles the CIA had to fight at every turn.

  Holystone’s curse came from its raison d’être: deniability. Holystone, its people, and its mission didn’t exist. If caught somewhere they shouldn’t be, doing something they shouldn’t be doing, operatives were on their own. As Dutcher explained it when Tanner had first come aboard, “It’s a brutal necessity—brutal for us, necessary for the president.”

  Tanner didn’t have to think long about the offer. Not only did he trust in Billings’s judgment, but like anyone who spent any time in the intelligence business, Briggs also knew of Leland Dutcher’s reputation. If he was at Holystone’s helm, it had to be something special.

  Dutcher was an old-school spook, having learned the business first with the OSS as a member of a Jedburgh Team dropped into occupied France to assist the Resistance against the German Wehrmacht, then with the CIA as it fought tooth and nail against the KGB and the East German Stazi in Cold War Berlin.

  As an agent controller, he’d won and lost both battles and people the world had never heard of and never would. He’d seen the CIA go from a small collection of case officers that succeeded through improvisation, dedication, and guile, to a premier intelligence agency armed with technology that had been unimaginable even twenty years before.

  Through it all, Dutcher had learned an unforgettable lesson: It was people, not technology, that drove the intelligence business. Cameras, microphones, and computers are a poor substitute for “eyeballs on the ground”—the impressions of a trained and seasoned spook.

  Soon after joining Holystone, Tanner realized he’d found a home, something he’d missed since leaving the tight-knit community of ISAG. In addition to Dutcher, there was Walter Oaken, his second-in-command—or as Dutcher often called him, “the oil that keeps the machine running”—and Tanner’s oldest friend, Ian Cahil, whom Tanner had recruited into Holystone a few years before. They were good people. He counted himself lucky.

  After leaving Vetsch, Tanner took 95 north to Washington, then 301 over the bridge across the bay and south to Tunis Mills. Holystone’s office, a Frank Lloyd Wrightesque building surrounded by Japanese maples and gold-mound spirea, sat perched above the banks of Leeds Creek, one of the hundreds of inlets along the eastern shore.

  Tanner pulled into the parking lot, walked up the path, and swiped his card key in the reader. At the muted click he pushed through the door into the foyer. Holystone’s layout was uncluttered, with high, vaulted ceilings and offices lining a sunken conference room. He walked back to Oaken’s office, poked his head in, and said, “Got a minute?” then continued on to Dutcher’s office.

  Dutcher looked up from a file and peered at Tanner through the pair of half-glasses perched on his nose. “I seem to recall you’re on vacation.”

  Briggs sat down on the sofa. “I love my job.”

  Oaken walked in, handed Tanner a cup of coffee, and took the seat before Dutcher’s desk.

  “Glad to hear it,” Dutcher said with a smile. “Now go home.”

  “I’ve got a situation.”

  Oaken asked, “Vetsch?”

  Tanner nodded.

  Dutcher laid aside the file. “Gill Vetsch? What’s going on?”

  “He called me this morning. His daughter, Susanna, went missing in Paris.”

  “When?”

  “Two weeks ago. She’s with the DEA, but beyond that, he doesn’t know much.”

  “FCI,” Oaken ventured, referring to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Foreign Cooperative Investigations branch.

  “That was my guess,” Tanner replied. “Gill got the call from the DEA’s public affairs officer, who sounded like he was reading from a script. That, and something else Gill said makes me think she was working intell—undercover, probably.”

  “What’s that?” asked Dutcher.

  “She was home for a few days at Easter. Gill said she’d changed—her hair was dyed, she had piercings and tattoos, her clothes were bordello ratty. She was withdrawn, distant …”

  Dutcher nodded. “Makes sense. I know the DEA’s been cozying up to the French SDCB the last few years. A lot of heroin has been streaming into Paris.”

  “The French connection lives,” Tanner said. Since the SDCB—the Sub-Directorate, Criminal Business—had beg
un cracking down on organized crime’s monopoly of gambling machines, the underworld had returned its attention to more traditional sources of income. And with heroin having again become chic in the U.S., the market was booming.

  “Since when is the DEA putting people on the ground in Europe?” Oaken asked.

  “Good question,” Dutcher replied. “What else did Gill know?”

  “Not much,” Tanner said. “He pushed it, made a lot of phone calls, but got nowhere.”

  “No unidentified bodies over there?”

  “No.”

  “Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean much.”

  While overseas DEA casualties had increased dramatically in the past five years, few bodies were ever found, as European drug organizations took a page from the Mafia’s book and started making sure their victims disappeared forever—especially U.S. agents, who were particularly despised. The dictum in the french underworld was Non allé, pas complètement—Not gone, not dead. The victim is not fully dead until they disappear.

  Thinking of that, Tanner felt his heart pound a little harder. She’s alive, he told himself. On the drive from Willowbrook he’d had time to think about Susanna Vetsch. Though she was now a woman of twenty-five, part of him would always see her as a bright and happy fourteen-year-old girl. Tanner had come to think of Susanna as the daughter he’d never had, and in return he’d become the uncle in whom she confided and relied.

  Tanner’s wife had died years before in an avalanche on a mountain in Colorado. Before then he’d never given much thought to the saying “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” having accepted it with the wisdom of ignorance. In the years that followed Elle’s death, during those times when he let himself think too much, he decided the phrase was at best cavalier, at worst cruel. The pain had faded with time, of course, but it never quite disappeared, a dull empty ache in the pit of his chest.

  Not that life was bad. In fact, life was pretty damned good most of the time, but Briggs now knew happiness wasn’t the sure thing he’d once thought it to be. You had to work at it, open yourself up, be ready to lose and to hurt, and never take anything for granted. In that respect, Elle’s death had been a positive for him.