The Seventh Floor, page 29
That night, she thought, was the first time he’d really seen what she was, even just that little bit peering above the waterline. He had hated it. And she said, Look Tom, I love my job. I can’t do anything else. Another long pause. Then Tom rolled over, pulled the chain to kill the lamp, and went to sleep.
Procter shut off the television. Tom had three kids now, she knew from a Google search she’d done a few years back. Photographs suggested he hadn’t gotten fat, which was a shame. He ran marathons with his wife, who looked about ten years younger and was a babe. The man had written six books and had tenure, she gleaned from his Wikipedia page. She’d chosen the job over Tom to save herself. But maybe she’d also been saving him.
Procter absentmindedly twisted and folded the doily in her fingers; for a long while thoughts clanked uselessly through the can of her head, until she was up, strolling through the fading afternoon light into the bathroom, where she hiked up her shirt and looked at the nine stars tattooed in a line across her lats, the words IN HONOR inked above. One star for each of the fallen officers she had avenged. A personal memorial wall on her skin. She looked hard at those stars in the mirror. There was a world where she just stopped, let it go. CIA had tossed her out. The building doesn’t love you back, after all. What could she possibly owe to a place that had released her from her vows? And yet . . .
Procter went to the bedroom and searched through her purse. Not finding what she wanted, she padded downstairs and pulled off the couch cushions. A Lifesaver. Two pennies. Crumbs. There—a quarter.
Sitting on the couch, she held the coin up to the light and told herself how it was going to be, in either case. Her fate in the hands of the intelligence gods.
She flipped the coin, caught it in her palm, and slapped it onto the back of her hand. She sneaked a peek.
George Washington.
“Goddammit,” she said, and flung the quarter across the room.
She packed her bag and walked to the main gate, figuring she would just call a cab to pick her up out front. It was hard to get into the Farm, not out. Upon seeing her, the guard said he had to make a call.
“No,” she said. “Open the gate.”
“Ms. Procter, I have instructions.”
“Who are you calling?”
“DDO’s office.”
“It’s pretty late, man, and Debs was just here. Said I could leave, so I’m leaving. Open the gate.”
The guard, hand on his carbine, said: “Why don’t you wait until morning to leave?”
“I’d like to leave now.”
Procter pointed at the lowered boom. The guard gave a weary smile, looked down, and tapped a palm on his carbine, the gesture more of a tic, she thought, than a threat. “Just got to be after I speak with the DDO.”
Procter stood there, reviewing the lowered boom. She told the guard to call Debs in the morning and was about to storm away when she stopped and said, “SRB still open?”
The guard gave her a barely perceptible smile and nodded.
The Student Recreation Building, the SRB, houses the Farm’s primary drinking establishment. Set in a common building surrounded by dorms, the SRB is the beating heart of the Base. Procter could recall Farm classmates whose labors here had netted spouses and exes, one-night stands and loving relationships, tradecraft acumen and chlamydia, sometimes one and the same.
Procter, in general a fan of drinking establishments, was not, however, fond of the SRB. Most of her memories involved pacing the sidewalks outside, burning through her phone’s minutes in tense conversations with Tom while her classmates inside drank and played darts and strutted around trying to bang each other.
In the bar fresh-faced trainees were playing pool and lobbing darts, drinking and laughing and telling each other lies. Procter spotted a bartender she recognized from her own Farm days—a rheumy-eyed woman with tremors who spilled a lot and doubled as one of the cafeteria lunch ladies. She’d been old back then and now she was a raisin. Procter ordered a beer and focused on a herd of paunchy graybeards. The instructors.
The classes required instructors who most nights would sidle up at the SRB to toss back a few beers and indoctrinate the trainees into the DO brotherhood (and it was a brotherhood). The communal drinking and raucous nighttime banter were encouraged by the instructors who, in addition to drilling the trainees on their tradecraft, paid close attention to how they handled their liquor and their tongues and bodies while under its influence. Now, beers in hand, sinking into tired green armchairs, the graybeards watched a trainee’s rump bend and wiggle while lining up her pool shot.
Procter approached the oldsters, said it had been a hot minute since she’d been to the Farm, and did the instructors permanently stationed here still get the houses down near the river? She was curious, is all. Had thought it seemed like a first cabin opportunity and was considering putting her name in the hat for a PCS job out here. One of the graybeards smiled.
“Of course,” he said. “I’ve been here fifteen months. Got one of the white bungalows near Dock A.”
Procter whistled and took a seat on an armrest. Two instructors tilted their heads to see around her. She twisted her neck to catch a glimpse of the trainee chick’s cleavage spread on the felt for another tricky shot. Procter turned back to the white bungalow guy.
“Let me guess,” she said. “You put the overtime and danger pay from a few war zone tours toward a sweet boat.”
He smiled; one of his comrades shook his head in knowing frustration, his face seeming to say: Not this damn story again.
“A twenty-seven-foot Albemarle.” The first instructor beamed.
“Twenty-seven-footer? No shit?” Procter said. “Set you back a pretty penny?”
“Put it this way. Its less expensive and more fun than a new wife,” said the man. “And the old wife, too. The lease is even less than the alimony.”
The farm is a secure installation defended by fifteen-foot fencing, razor wire, guards, pole cameras, and an army of unseen infrared cameras and sensors. But inside the Base almost no one locks houses or cars. Keys are left in the open. Bikes are strewn about.
Procter walked down toward the long row of primo Farm real estate overlooking the river. It was dark and, from the road, through the tree cover, she could not quite make out the color and design of each home, nor the presence of a trailer in the drive. Four times she hiked up driveways to find no trailer, no white bungalow.
On the fifth she found it. “Holy hell,” Procter muttered, and just looked up at it for a moment, her brain firing off in all directions under the assault of the memories. The guy lived in Ganston’s old house. She imagined herself up there with her friends, looking down at herself two decades later, a long cord drawn through the years. A gust of cold wind kicked up and the siren that announced her victories and her failures—Damascus, Dushanbe, a black farm outside Petersburg, Afghanistan—began to bay from deep in her brainbox, and she could feel the truth, the awful truth that the whole Service had been turned inside out by one of her friends, Langley’s collective butt had been pulled through its mouth like a tongue and its tongue from its butthole like a tail, and if she did not do her part, then everything strung on that cord from then to now would be for naught.
The boat was hitched to a black King Ranch pickup. The car doors were unlocked but she could not find the keys inside. She peered into the darkened house. Rang the doorbell. No answer. Like everything else, the front door was unlocked. A wooden bowl sat on a table in the foyer. Papers, pens, cigarettes, a lighter. Ford keys. She punched the unlock button and headlamps flicked on in the drive. Rifling through the papers, she found another key ring with a plastic chain on it that read: Dove Marina and Watersports.
On a whim she stopped halfway out the door. Turning around, she marched upstairs and into the master bedroom. She opened the cabinet under the sink and felt around the bottom of the basin. Her fingers met tape, then paper. She plied back the tape, then, kneeling, she worked off the nub of glue she’d applied to the photo in that long-ago November. Apparently, a plumber had not visited this sink during the intervening quarter century. She tugged it out, blew off the dust, and stared at it for a moment: yellowed and fraying and faded. She’d thought the photo scandalous then, could recall nudging Debs’s shoulder for a laugh while she’d been cutting it out. But now? Hell, twenty-five years later, and she’d done the stuff in the photo herself. More than once, in fact. She tucked the picture in her pocket and hustled downstairs.
She tossed her duffel into the pickup and drove to Dock A, backing the trailer down into the launch. Two trainees, necking on the dock, did not bother asking why Procter might be putting a boat into the river alone, and well past dark. In the pickup she scribbled a note that read: I’ll leave the boat near the Point. Sorry about this. She set it on the dash and left the keys in the center console.
Tossing her duffel into the boat, Procter brought the engine to life and eased out into the glassy, moonlit water of the river.
41
I-95 NORTH / CRYSTAL CITY
At the point, Procter had tied up the boat and walked to a bar. Using the bar’s phone, she called Sam on the burner number she’d memorized, then a cab that ferried her to the bus station, where she paid cash for a ticket on the last northbound Greyhound, now grinding through inexplicable late-night traffic on I-95. It had been stop-and-go for a while, but Procter hardly noticed; she was thinking about what she might set in motion, racking her brain to remember every detail of the REMORA case from back in the mists of time, before this sordid affair had become a blood-soaked journey into the pit of her soul. Brake lights ahead glowed orange. The bus stopped again, and another collective groan went up. Procter’s head slumped into the window. Up to this point Procter didn’t think she’d see the inside of a prison cell for her crimes. Now, though? Well, after flipping that coin, she wasn’t so sure.
The air in the Crystal City safe house was stale when Procter flung open the door and waved Sam inside. Place was trashed, whether from neglect or the Chief’s few hours here alone, Sam could not know. A trail of ants was running up one of the counters toward a lime the color of sack paper. She’d brewed a pot of coffee and, judging by the smell, had vaporized maybe a half pack of cigarettes, fumigating the place while she waited for him to show. Sam lugged in a bag of groceries. She shut the door behind him.
“Don’t give me any goddamn sympathy about the bombing,” she said. “I can’t handle any of the mushy stuff from you. Let’s just eat. Yeah, you can put it over there.”
He did the steaks on the cooktop, then arranged the table with a loaf of sourdough, a wedge of blue cheese, and two glasses, each of which he filled with a sensible finger of whiskey. With about six ounces to go in his steak, Sam said, “Does Sweet know I was in Vegas with you?”
“She knows somebody was with me. Not necessarily that it was you, though she has her suspicions. Frankie’s description of you was apparently not so detailed.”
Sam spread cheese across a hunk of bread. “The other three would probably guess it was me. The mole certainly would.”
“The mole knows you’re involved already,” Procter said.
“Why’d they try to kill you, then?”
“They could be coming for you next, who knows? You break it off with Natalie yet? You’ve got an even better reason now. Her safety.”
“Not yet,” he mumbled. “There’s been a lot going on.”
“You’re a dumbass. You mind if I smoke, by the way?”
“I think you’ve earned it.”
“Bless you.” Procter eased back from the table and reached into her pocket for her lighter. Her lips pursed into a knowing smile while she was fishing around in her jeans. She emptied her pocket on the table. Setting aside the lighter, she unfolded a single picture. At first she was amused, grinning—it was weird, he thought, she seemed almost happy—but her face shed its humor the longer she stared. The grin melted into a thin, rueful smile that soon liquefied entirely, leaving the Chief looking merely sad. She folded up the photo and flicked angrily to light her cigarette. The cheap lighter gave her some trouble.
“Can I see it?” He extended a hand across the table.
She smacked it into his palm with a smirk. He unfolded it. Stared. Blinked.
“Jeez,” he said. “This real? Doesn’t seem possible.”
“Oh, it’s possible,” she said, casting a cloud of smoke over her shoulder. “Believe me.”
“You carting it around like some twisted security blanket?”
“Found it at the Farm. Little souvenir.”
“Is it . . .”
“It is. An original. Turned out the guy I stole the boat from lives in Ganston’s old house. I went in for a look-see.” She laughed and took a long drag on the cigarette.
“Who hid this one?”
“Who do you think? None of those other clowns would’ve been able to find a spot so secure that it’d still be there twenty-five years later. I might not have been the top dog, but I was the scrappiest. You can take that to the bank.” Her laugh this time was more melancholic. “True at the Farm, true again in Afghanistan, and now . . .”
She trailed off, and for a moment of companionable silence he went back to his steak and she to her cigarette until she was ready to go on.
“I’ve got a theory I’d like to test with you,” she said. “I’d wager that you’re with me on most of it already, but I think it’s time to say it aloud, figure out where we might go from here.”
Kicked back in her chair, slowly burning through a Slim, she began: “The Russians have recruited a senior CIA officer. But instead of a turn-and-burn to wreck our Moscow stable, roll up twenty sources overnight, Zhomov plays it slow and creative, possibly because he understands the nature of the clay he’s molding here. He’s got a big fish on his hook, a guy or gal who understands that what happened to Ames and Hanssen was in part because their reporting got assets killed or jailed, and the Derms wove together their matrices, and then a hunt was on. Zhomov sees this mole as a potential agent of influence, maybe someone who could be Deputy Director or even Director someday. Someone that might hand the Agency, effectively, over to Russian control. Zhomov’s patient with his burrowing mole. Sticks-and-bricks commo plan, infrequent meets, maybe annually, maybe twice if they can find the cover. The mole’s in it for money, sure, but also for some hidden fanaticism that I cannot, as of yet, truly see or understand. I’d submit the first time the mole peeks its head aboveground is to rat on the outreach from Golikov and your meeting in Singapore. The mole was surprised by Golikov—hell, if what that Russian told you is true, the Special Section sprang a leak somewhere, and the whole promise of Zhomov’s shop is that it doesn’t leak. I’d also wager that poor BUCCANEER’s recall from Greece, and maybe CLAW’s roll-up, were overreaches, mistakes, or the result of bureaucratic shenanigans or dysfunction in Moscow. SVR doesn’t always play so nice with the FSB cousins, and vice versa. I could see the FSB jonesing for arrests.”
Sam had so far maintained a steady gaze in the direction of the living room wall, sometimes folding his napkin in his fingers, or drumming them nervously across the table. “How would the mole have known what Golikov was going to share with me?”
“I think it was an educated guess. Golikov’s message wasn’t specific, but it was very urgent. Very serious. And he had primo access inside the Kremlin. My theory—again, Jaggers, theory—has it that the mole thought, based on Golikov’s position, that he might be trying to sell the mole’s identity to us. And in that case, something had to be done. Action had to be taken.”
“And the timing works,” he said. “Even if we assume the commo plan is sticks-and-bricks.”
“Just barely,” she acknowledged. “But it works. In this theory, Zhomov’s principal deception is the asset known as REMORA, an SVR colonel, and now arguably Russia House’s crown jewel, whose information”—she was watching him closely to see its impact—“has been critical in three major events of the past year. One, he signaled for a crash meet just as you and I were planning for Singapore, and at this meeting told Mac, Theo, and Debs that the Russians were looking to target Americans in Asia. Two: REMORA supplied an innocent rationale for your imprisonment, and, in a wild twist, helped CIA target the SVR officer that we would eventually swap for you. And three: it was REMORA who again flew the signal just as you and I were ramping up this investigation, before the bombing at my trailer perpetrated by freaks doubtless in Kremlin employ. Three emergency signals precede meetings in France significant to Golikov, your imprisonment, and the attempt on my life. Those are verifiable facts. Now, REMORA has given us some good shit, Jaggers. It’s a primo case. The haul has catapulted careers inside Russia House. It’s the kind of case ops officers make their bones on. And seen in one light, that’s all it is.”
“And in the other?” he asked.
“It’s a drip to screw with us, influence us, and to provide operational cover for the mole to meet with Russians to sell our secrets. The facts are consistent with a theory that what we have seen is a pattern of Russian attempts—quarterbacked, sure as sugar, by Rem Zhomov—to protect their mole. To safeguard their access and investment.”
“And there is no proof,” he said. “After all of it, there is no proof yet.”
“Right. This really won’t wash anywhere,” she said. “There’s the pattern in the finished intel: the wheat to get us hooked, then the chaff so they don’t give away the farm. There’s the firing of Petra Devine after she started poking around. There’s Frankie’s recollection that REMORA is one of Zhomov’s men. There’s grist for motive among our little bestiary of suspects. There are garden-variety lies and deceptions, particularly about who was at the REMORA meeting on the cusp of Singapore, in what order, and when. But I do not believe, Jaggers, that a desktop exercise will untangle this web. It takes a mole to catch a mole. No Derm matrix is going to give us the answer, but it’s narrowed the field, and—”
