Black Wolf, page 15
“Alexi,” she said quietly, “what is William Cutler to you?”
Alexi took a few breaths and said, “He is…my friend.”
“Is that all?”
He looked at her, his face guileless. “Is that not enough?”
She kept her expression neutral but answered his question silently. Not in Soviet Russia, it’s not.
Alexi dropped her off in front of the Planeta with a friendly, but formal, goodbye. She thanked him for the picnic and the drive into the countryside, and when he pulled away, she stood a moment at the entrance of the hotel, trying to reorient her feelings.
The first was a sharp spike of annoyance. She’d allowed herself to be momentarily immobilized by a strong sexual attraction for a man she hardly knew—a man who most likely was a Soviet intelligence gatherer. She wasn’t a high school student anymore, paralyzed by shyness and crippling self-doubt.
The second was a lingering frustration; if Alexi, a member of the police, knew women were mistreated and murdered in Minsk, why was no one in a position of power talking about it?
And the third was a seductive warmth she couldn’t shake, an appreciation for a day away from the city, out in rolling fields so much like her home; the past few hours forming a powerful blend of nostalgia and novelty.
Walking into the lobby, she was surprised to see Dan sitting in a chair and looking worried. When he saw her, he stood and approached her as he might someone who’d just walked away from a car accident. Or a hostage situation.
He took her elbow and guided her back out and into the park. Mel reluctantly took her place on a bench, and he surreptitiously looked around, making sure they were out of listening range.
“Are you all right?” he asked quietly.
“Yes, I’m fine.” His elevated concern was raising her own anxieties. “Didn’t William call you this morning? He told me he’d called you about arranging some kind of excursion for me out of the city.”
“Yes, he did. But he didn’t tell me you’d be spending the day with a Soviet policeman.” He leaned in closer. “But that’s not the main reason I was concerned.”
“Why? What’s happened?”
He angled his body away from the windows of the hotel. “About a half hour after you left, two KGB officers showed up looking for you.”
“For me? Why?” Diplomatic status or no, Melvina Donleavy was a lowly secretary. No one but William should know different. And despite her high clearance within the Agency, there might be very little the State Department could do if she was arrested for espionage.
A nicely dressed man had walked out of the hotel, casually lighting a cigarette and strolling in their direction.
“That guy,” Mel said, lifting her chin in the man’s direction, “is a hotel guest. He’s been keeping an eye on us.”
Dan quickly looked at him and then back at Mel. “Never seen him before. You sure?”
“Very sure.”
He grasped her elbow and they walked on to the gazebo. She could feel the tension rolling off his body in waves. They both faced the river as though taking in the view.
“They found something when they pulled Katya from the river,” he said, his lips barely moving.
For a moment Mel stopped breathing. “What kind of something?”
“They wouldn’t tell me. They would only say that it’s something that ties Katya to you.” He flashed a warning look at Mel. “Did you give her anything compromising? A note, or a telephone number?”
“I gave her a used tube of lipstick and a candy bar, that’s all.” But of course, they’d planned more. “The last time I saw her at the ministry, she did say she might meet with me for a drink, or a meal.”
Dan exhaled sharply and gripped the railing. “I’m to bring you to KGB headquarters for questioning tomorrow morning.”
It was one thing to learn about the Committee for State Security, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, in the safety of an Agency briefing. But it was another thing entirely to be summoned by them. Mel sat very still, considering the possible implications. Her name, in the mouths of a universally feared military machine.
“Okay…” Dan took a few steadying breaths. “I called William as soon as they’d left and he’s going to meet us tomorrow morning, early, for a prep talk. He said he’d try and get as much information as he could tonight. So maybe we’ll know what it is they’ve got.”
The hotel guest was slowly making his way to the gazebo. He was contemplating his shoes as though deep in thought. Dan and Mel left the cover of the structure and continued their walk through the park.
“Look,” Dan said, “I don’t want you to worry about this. You’ve done nothing wrong. This is probably what William calls a fishing expedition. Just stick to your backstory, no embellishments, no ad-libbing, and you’ll be fine. Remember your Agency training and don’t try to fill in the silence.” He stopped and faced her. “You believe me, right? I won’t let anything happen to you.”
In that moment, Mel realized that Dan was more nervous for her than she was for herself. She was an untried asset, whose skills had not been clearly defined by their Agency contacts. He was uncertain of her ability to withstand questioning and maintain her cover. He needed reassurance that she could carry her weight.
“Dan,” she said, forcing her voice to remain steady, “you don’t have to worry about me. I wouldn’t have been sent on this mission if the Agency felt I wasn’t ready. I can handle a question-and-answer session. Trust me, I won’t let you down.”
As they walked back to the hotel, Dan advised her to spend the rest of the day in her room. Mel nodded, relieved to be going to the solitude, and relative safety, of her room. She would crawl into bed and sleep.
When she got out of the elevator on the second floor, Dan held the door and said, “Anyone knocks, you pick up the phone and ring my room, or Ben’s. Don’t let anyone in until one of us is with you, okay?”
She nodded and walked down the hallway toward the dejournaya. It was not the same woman to whom she’d given the sweater. This one, presumably the weekend monitor, was older and hard-eyed, and when Mel asked for her key, she passed it to Mel grudgingly, and in silence.
Chapter 13
Sunday, August 5, 1990
Mel did her memory processing in the bathtub at five o’clock. The faces were few—the old babushka from Dubrova, the lone people waiting at the bus stops, the few truck drivers passing on the highway—but she immediately felt the usual physical and mental relief. At six thirty, Dan appeared with her dinner. He lingered in the open doorway, as though wishing to be invited in. Not wanting to give him any encouragement that could be misconstrued, she assured him she was all right, no one else had come knocking, and she’d be going to bed early. They agreed to meet in the lobby at eight o’clock the next morning for their briefing with William.
Mel closed the door and sagged against it. It was exhausting trying to decipher people’s true intentions. She exhaled forcefully—but that was exactly her job now. To assess, to report, to act appropriately on the intelligence gathered. But where was the truth when you were always acting a part, along with everyone else? A remembered quote came to her: James Jesus Angleton, the godfather of the CIA for twenty years who ended his life stark raving mad from the paranoia of trying to ferret out the truth from a cesspool of lies. His dying words were “The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted.”
The plate of food Dan had given her consisted of cabbage, some kind of stringy meat, and carrots, which had all gone cold. Mel only picked at it before setting it aside. She sat in the chair, its back turned toward the two-way mirror, and stared out the window.
In the quiet, she thought about her father and their last face-to-face conversation. That had been before she’d left for her CIA training, at the beginning of 1989. It was after Christmas, which she’d spent at her father’s farm just outside Madison after completing her twenty weeks at Quantico.
Her academy graduation day had been December 21, 1988. The day that Pan Am Flight 103 crashed violently into the southern Scottish town of Lockerbie, after a suitcase filled with plastic explosives had detonated, ripping the plane apart and killing 259 passengers and crew, 190 of them Americans.
The explosive device had been concealed inside a cassette recorder, which was then packed inside a suitcase and stored in the plane’s cargo area. Suspicion fell on Libya and its leader, Mu‘ammar Gaddhafi, but even without proof, the attack rattled the intelligence community. Already, the FBI seemed to have a new goal: to counter the expanding threat of terrorism.
Standing at graduation, Mel had already been aware that something new and deadly had begun taking shape on the international stage. Extremist groups were being formed by disgruntled fundamentalists in the Middle East; wealthy facilitators, like the rising Osama bin Laden, who had been emboldened by the surprising victory of jihadists over Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Had Melvina stayed with the FBI, she would have asked to join this new counterterrorism task force.
But at her ceremony, she’d been pulled aside by the director of special projects—a short, compact ex-Marine nicknamed the Bullet for his bald head—and presented to a mild-mannered man in a gray suit. He’d introduced himself as Special Agent Thomas Hunter from Washington, DC, and handed her a card upon which was printed his name, title, and CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY. No address, only a phone number.
They’d entered an empty classroom, where the Bullet left the two of them alone.
Agent Hunter had perched on a desk, brushing invisible wrinkles from his trousers, and gestured for her to take a chair. “May I call you Melvina?”
She nodded and sat down, wary.
He looked at her for a few beats and then asked, “Melvina, what do you know about fissionable material?”
She’d flown into Madison the evening of December twenty-third. Her father had picked her up in his battered work cruiser, driving the twenty-five miles home through a softly falling snow. The farm had been in Walter’s family for three generations and encompassed a modest two-story house and a barn that had, at one time, held fifty milk cows. Now it only housed two. With no spouse or other children to help him run things, and with the long hours demanded of him as a sheriff, there’d been no time left for Walter to tend livestock or grow crops.
During the drive they’d chatted sporadically about the lousy, but unsurprising, season the Green Bay Packers had had, and the surprising statewide win by Dukakis over Bush. Her father groused about the $90 million spent on the new Bradley sports center, and Mel remarked that the ice crusting the shoreline of Lake Mendota looked like beautiful lace.
Walter had ducked his chin into his collarbone but smiled. “You sound like your mother just now. It’s good to be reminded you got some of her poetry and not all my rough edges.”
She studied her father’s face, wondering how in the world two such different people could have set up house and had a child together. She accepted, maybe for the first time, that she was not just Sheriff Walter Donleavy’s daughter—strong, capable, and self-sufficient—but Alice’s daughter as well. At times prone to imaginative flights of fancy and romantic imagery. This realization gave her a surge of confidence. She was an Ophelia who could swim.
As they passed horses in a snow-drifted field, thick-coated as woolly mammoths, he reminded Mel of the time she rode a green broke mare, contrary to his warnings not to.
Mel smiled. “We rode over a bevy of quail, and she bucked me off. Broke my ankle. Took me forty-five minutes to catch her again.”
His grin widened with pride. “And yet you walked home, close to two miles, leading that mare. Swearing all the way. Had to cut the boot off your foot.”
Once they’d gotten home, she’d dropped her bags in her childhood bedroom and followed her father out to feed the cows. It had stopped snowing, and a brisk wind had chased the clouds northward, leaving the night sky a brilliant, clear turquoise. The snow reflected ambient light so that it was bright enough to navigate between the house and barn without a flashlight.
The smell of the barn, yeasty and warm, flooded her with old memories: the delicious expectation of being caught while playing hide-and-seek behind mountainous bales of hay; hours of solitary reading in the loft, watching shafts of sunlight march across the stalls; burying her face in the yielding and bristly haunches of the sad-eyed Guernseys. The farm had always been a place of refuge and comfort for Mel, timeless, changeless. And she wondered now how long it would be before she’d be able to return to it.
After he poured grain into the feeding bins, Walter turned to her and asked, “You gonna tell me now what’s bothering you?”
She should have known he’d sense her apprehension. He always could read her, especially her silences. So she told him about the mild-mannered man from the CIA and his offer.
Her father’s knuckles whitened on the handle of the bucket. “And what did you tell him?”
She reached out, stroking the nose of the nearest cow. Stalling would not make it any easier; she owed him the truth. “I said yes.”
He started shaking his head. “Guatemala, Laos, the Bay of Pigs—”
“I know how you feel about the CIA, Dad.”
“Then why, Mel? You just spent twenty weeks completing your FBI training. You could be applying for a post with the Feds right now.”
She took his hand and they walked back to the house. They sat at the kitchen table, the table that had been built by her grandfather, and Walter poured a generous measure of whiskey into two small jelly jars, one for each of them. She’d drunk her breakfast juice out of those glasses for most of her childhood.
Mel had folded her hands on the table and stared at the patterns in the wood. “Something happened at Quantico. They know about me.”
Understanding flared in her father’s eyes. “Danny Delvecchio.”
She nodded.
In the fall of 1980 when she was sixteen, Mel had gone with her father into the nearby town of Sauk City to get feed supplies. She sat in his truck, radio on, windows down, and stared dreamily at the colors of the turning leaves. At the end of the street was a bank with a van parked in front, the engine idling. She thought it strange that the driver had left the vehicle running.
Then the door to the bank was flung open and a man wearing a ski mask ran out. He yanked open the passenger-side door of the van. In the driver’s seat another head popped up, putting the van in drive and roaring down the street toward her. As the vehicle raced by, the passenger pulled his mask off, giving Mel a brief, but indelible, look at him. The driver was wearing a cowboy hat with the brim pulled low. But a split-second view of his mouth and jawline was enough. She recognized both of them from their photos in the local paper. They were both high school football stars, and the getaway driver was Danny Delvecchio, the mayor’s son.
Walter had run to the bank to offer assistance, so it was a few hours before Mel could talk to him alone about what she’d seen. With her father’s encouragement, she gave an official statement through the sheriff’s office, certain that she had correctly identified the robbers.
The reaction from the mayor’s office was swift, and brutal. The mayor gave an interview to the local paper, intimating that the Donleavy girl had some hidden, vengeful agenda against his son.
When the DA asked Mel about her motivations, she looked at him with a steady gaze and said, “Because it’s the truth.”
The DA ultimately wouldn’t believe that Mel had been able to identify two boys she’d never met, and Walter Donleavy’s position as sheriff was threatened unless his daughter dropped her ridiculous claims. The mayor’s son had never gotten so much as a traffic ticket. It was the first time Mel had brought her abilities out from the shadows in such a public way, and for many years to come, it’d be the last.
Soon after she reluctantly recanted, Mel began to receive anonymous, threatening phone calls. They lasted for months. Her sophomore year was a misery, and she spent more and more time at the farm.
One winter evening when Walter was working late, Mel was alone with only her father’s aging sheepdog. She’d let the dog out just before bed and soon afterward heard a high-pitched squeal. The roar of a powerful engine brought her to the door in time to see a red truck tearing away from the house, throwing dirt and rocks in its wake. When she rushed into the yard, she found their dog howling in pain, shot with an arrow in its haunch. The dog survived the injury and, as importantly to Mel, she’d recognized the truck. It was the prized possession of the mayor’s son.
A few days later, she’d said good night to her father and climbed the stairs to her bed. After a few hours, fueled by a simmering anger, she’d eased out of the second-story window and walked the six miles through the snow to the Delvecchio home, carrying a bottle of bleach. She’d emptied the entire bottle into the red truck’s gas tank. After returning home, winded from walking twelve miles in drifts up to her knees, she lay down next to the injured dog, burying her face in his fur. It had snowed again later that night, covering any tracks she had left.
Later, when questioned about the ruined vehicle, her father swore to high heaven that Melvina Donleavy had been in bed asleep the entire night.
Following that event, bad luck seemed to stalk Delvecchio junior for months. Cow pats were left in his school locker, a hard-core porn magazine turned up amid his school reports, and several large carpet tacks were strategically placed inside his football shoes. One of the puncture wounds became infected, benching him the entire spring. However much the injured jock suspected Mel, she always seemed to be elsewhere—across campus, in the library, erecting sets for the school play. He alone was left believing that the angelic-faced Melvina Donleavy was responsible for exacting revenge for her injured dog and making his life miserable.
The following year Danny Delvecchio was arrested trying to buy a muscle car with the marked bills he had stolen from the Sauk City bank. On the day of the arrest Walter sat with Mel at the kitchen table.
