The Coldest Warrior E-Book

Paul Vidich

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 354

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The new novel by acclaimed espionage author Paul Vidich explores the dark side of intelligence, when a CIA officer delves into a cold case from the 1950s-with fatal consequences. In 1953, at the end of the Korean War, Dr. Charles Wilson, an Army bio-weapons scientist, died when he 'jumped or fell' from the ninth floor of a Washington hotel. As his wife and children grieve, the details of his death remain buried for twenty-two years. With the release of the Rockefeller Commission report on illegal CIA activities in 1975, LSD is linked to Wilson's death, and suddenly the Wilson case becomes news again. Wilson's family and the press are demanding answers, suspecting the CIA of foul play, and men in the CIA, FBI, and White House conspire to make sure the truth doesn't get out. Enter agent Jack Gabriel, an old friend of the Wilson family who is instructed by the CIA director to find out what really happened to Wilson. It's Gabriel's last mission before he retires from the agency, and his most perilous as he finds a continuing cover-up that reaches to the highest levels of government. Key witnesses connected to the case die from suspicious causes, and Gabriel realizes that the closer he gets to the truth, the more he puts himself and his family at risk.

Leseprobe

Praise for Paul Vidich

‘Cold War spy fiction in the grand tradition, neatly plotted betrayals in that shadow world where no one can be trusted and agents are haunted by their own moral compromises’ – Joseph Kanon,New York Times bestselling author of Istanbul Passage and The Good German

‘An unputdownable mole hunt written in terse, noirish prose, driving us inexorably forward’ – Olen Steinhauer, author of The Tourist

‘This is splendid stuff, with a complexity and reach. Vidich is clearly a name to watch’ – Barry Forshaw, editor of Crime Time

‘Vidich spins a tale of moral and psychological complexity, recalling Graham Greene… rich, rewarding’ – Booklist

‘A cool, knowing, and quietly devastating thriller that vaults Paul Vidich into the ranks of such thinking-man’s spy novelists as Joseph Kanon and Alan Furst. Like them, Vidich conjures not only a riveting mystery but a poignant cast of characters, a vibrant evocation of time and place, and a rich excavation of human paradox’ – Stephen Schiff(writer and executive producer of acclaimedtelevision drama The Americans)

‘An Honorable Man is that rare beast: a good, old-fashioned spy novel. But like the best of its kind, it understands that the genre is about something more: betrayal, paranoia, unease, and sacrifice. For a book about the Cold War, it left me with a warm, satisfied glow’ – John Connolly, #1 internationallybestselling author of A Song of Shadows

‘Fans of John le Carré will appreciate the backroom, clubby old-boy network that seemed to define spying in the 1950s’ – Publishers Weekly

‘An Honorable Man is one heck of a debut novel’ – The REAL Book Spy

‘A richly atmospheric and emotionally complex… tale of spies versus spies in the Cold War… Vidich writes with an economy of style that acclaimed espionage novelists might do well to emulate. This looks like the launch of a great career in spy fiction’ – Booklist starred review

For Alice, Eric, Lisa, and Nils

Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.

– George Orwell,

Politics and the English Language

PREFACE

Family tragedy drew me to Cold War literary fiction.

My uncle Frank Olson died sometime around 2:30 am on November 28, 1953 when he “jumped or fell” from his room on the thirteenth floor of the Statler Hotel in New York City. The New York Medical Examiner’s report contained that ambiguous description of how Frank came to land on the sidewalk early that morning. Frank Olson was a highly skilled Army scientist who worked at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, a top-secret US Army facility that researched biological warfare agents. He had gone to New York to see a psychiatrist in the company of a CIA escort. This was all the family knew about Frank’s death for twenty-two years.

Then, in June 1975, one bit of new information came to light. Buried inside a report by The Rockefeller Commission, which had been established by President Ford to investigate allegations of illegal CIA activity within the US, was a two-paragraph account of an army scientist who had been unwittingly given LSD and died in a fall from a hotel window in New York. To the conflicting theories that Frank Olson “jumped or fell” another possibility was added: he was thrown out. Frank Olson’s death came to embody our collective fascination with the Cold War’s dark secrets, and it has shined light on the dubious privileges men in the CIA gave themselves in the name of national security.

Frank Olson left behind his wife, Alice, my aunt, and three young children, Eric, Lisa, and Nils. Their lives went on, but were never the same, and Frank’s death traumatized each of them in deeply personal ways. Eric, the eldest, dedicated his life to unpacking the mystery of his father’s death.

I observed this tragedy over the years from within the tenuous intimacy of our family connection. I witnessed how my cousin Eric’s search was frustrated by an agency clinging to it secrets. None of the volumes of books on the CIA and biochemical warfare dug deeply into the minds of the men who inhabited Frank’s world – and even today questions about his death remain unanswered. I was curious about the men who were responsible, but they remained hidden, opaque, masked, and the secrets were hidden inside an obfuscating mist. I believe that is why, some years ago, I decided to put the story inside a novel.

My account of the case is told from within the CIA – an inside-out approach – not the outside-in view of Errol Morris’s documentary on the subject, Wormwood, which recalls the frustrating effort of my cousin Eric to penetrate the opaque barrier that hides everything inside the Agency. The Coldest Warrior is not an effort to recreate the past, but rather, characters and a plot are grafted onto the original incident, and it imagines an outcome. Albert Camus said it well: “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

My novel puts a human face on the Cold War by focusing on the psychological burdens of its characters rather than on Byzantine plot, or high politics. Doubt and paranoia bred in a culture of secrecy characterize the novel, as does a sophisticated amorality of men at the top of intelligence bureaucracy, and above all there is the strain put on family, friends, and faith. Men who work in covert operations inevitably bring some of that darkness into themselves, suffering the moral hazards of a line of work that sanctions lying, deceit, and murder. The interplay of state secrets and individual lives is central to the novel.

1

Washington D.C., 1953

A solid man of average height not yet thirty years old, stood in the ninth-floor hotel room and placed the telephone in its cradle, ending a difficult conversation. His tuxedo was at odds with the room’s drab, charmless atmosphere, and he brushed hair from his forehead with the unconscious gesture of a man whose sense of entitlement was rattled. He walked to the window, sipping from the two fingers of scotch he’d poured into a paper cup, and gazed at the dark clouds that blanketed the resting city. A curse slipped from his lips: Shit.

Phillip Treacher pondered the lie that he had just told his wife to explain why he wouldn’t be joining her that night at the president’s Thanksgiving gala. He misled friends, misrepresented himself to neighbors, and regularly carried out assignments that required him to go dark or use an alias, but this was his first lie to his new wife.

She knew he worked for the CIA, and she had come to understand in the first months of their marriage that when he came home in a sullen mood, there had been a problem at work – and she knew not to ask. They had established boundaries for their conversations, and his grimace was a signal that he couldn’t answer her questions. But when he drank heavily at dinner, she guessed that a Soviet double agent had died and his harsh interrogation had been a success.

Treacher had tried to soften the blow by starting the conversation with a few questions about inconsequential things – her gown back from the tailor for the weekend gala. Does it fit? And gossip about who would be at the White House and who would not. Casual chat that he kept up heroically until she interrupted. What’s wrong? Where are you? He said something unexpected had come up and he wouldn’t be able to make it. Her silence was the longest of their marriage, and without saying more, he knew she would ask the question that he couldn’t answer. He felt a terrible responsibility to keep her in the dark about an urgent national security matter of acute sensitivity.

He considered letting her hold onto her shock and anger, but he felt the need to offer a plausible explanation that she could tell other guests who asked why she’d come alone. I’ve been called out of town. Regret, guilt, remorse. These were the feelings that he permitted himself in the moment of his deception. But he had not considered, even for a moment, describing what he was doing a few blocks away in the Hotel Harrington.

Treacher stared at the black telephone. He drained the scotch from his paper cup and crushed it in his big fist. Too short for college basketball, too light for football, too slow for baseball, he had tried tennis, track, even fencing, before he settled on Yale’s rowing team, which was a good match for his strong hands. He still raced one-man sculls at dawn before his late-sleeping wife, Tammy, woke, and he got an hour of grueling exercise on the Potomac before going to the office. Treacher tossed the crumpled cup into the wastebasket and turned his attention to the silvered smokiness of the room’s two-way mirror.

Between two queen-size beds there was a nightstand with a forest green banker’s lamp, a telephone, and the afternoon’s tabloid, which had been folded in thirds after having been read and discarded. A middle-aged man sat on the bed nearest the window. He wore a gray suit jacket, but he had no tie, slacks, shoes, or socks. He was morosely slumped half-undressed on the edge of the bed, cradling his head in his hands. Quiet now, Treacher thought.

Treacher’s immediate thought was that this man, Dr Charles Wilson, couldn’t possibly be a national security threat, couldn’t possibly be dangerous. He moved closer to the two-way mirror and saw that the quiet man was now deeply agitated. Dr Wilson looked at his wristwatch, then stared at the telephone for a long time, visibly impatient and upset. He glanced at his watch again. His face was drawn and pale. Treacher thought the unthinkable and shuddered. The judgment winged across his consciousness: At least he’ll be at peace in his grave when this dreadful night is over.

*

Phillip Treacher was no stranger to the Hotel Harrington. He had been in room 918 before, under different circumstances, with a different security problem – and always the sensible spirit of the place provided a gloss of normalcy to the dirty business.

It was Washington’s oldest hotel and, at eleven floors, one of the tallest buildings in the city. Its location near the White House and close to the Smithsonian made it a top pick for out-of-town visitors. Its height had attracted the city’s first television station, Channel 5, which maintained its antenna on the roof and operated studios in a converted ballroom on the mezzanine. There, two iconoscope video cameras pointed toward the stage where Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux and his choir sang hymns every Thursday for the television audience. That Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 1953, was no different. Spectators crowded the soundproof-glass wall and watched the animated evangelist in his tuxedo lead singers through a medley of rousing spirituals.

Channel 5’s popular programming drew a lively crowd of musicians, actors, and tourists to the hotel’s lobby, where they mixed with loitering fans and budget-minded diners going to the self-service Kitcheteria, or their elegant opposite, who came with reservations to the Pink Elephant Cocktail Lounge. Diplomats, lobbyists, and out-of-town businessmen moved swiftly to the elevators in the company of girlfriends or prostitutes without attracting the disapproval of the concierge, a smartly dressed professional, who noticed everything and remembered nothing. Lively social commerce made the Hotel Harrington a good location for a CIA safe house.

*

Again, the telephone. Treacher turned away from the sidewalk spectacle of unruly fans surrounding Elder Lightfoot’s car and looked back into the room. His first thought was that his wife had found a way to trace their call and was phoning back. He picked up the receiver on the third ring. ‘Hello.’

‘Phil?’

Treacher recognized the voice of the head of Technical Services. ‘Who else would it be?’

‘What’s the news? Any update?’

Treacher heard the boozy laughter of partying guests in the background. ‘Are you coming over?’

‘No, I can’t. It’s on you. What’s the update?’

Treacher had been the unlucky junior man to pull holiday duty. ‘Two Office of Security men found him in the television studio. He’d thrown away his wallet in the lobby. He was barefoot and extremely agitated, and he demanded to go on camera. He pushed his way to the newscaster before he was stopped.’

‘Christ! Is he spinning out of control?’

‘Spun. He’s spun. I think he’s gone. You can look forward to the arc of what he knows falling on a widening audience.’

‘What is he saying?’

‘Anthrax.’ Treacher waited a moment. ‘You’re quiet, Herb.’ Phillip Treacher knew that the threads of ruinous danger were unspooling in Herb Weisenthal’s fevered mind. The word would have produced a chaotic montage of top secret locations – Fort Detrick’s stainless-steel incubators, dark landing strips on the Korean Peninsula, Berlin Station’s basement interrogation cells, Porton Down’s locked gates guarded by men with tommy guns – the vast sweep of a covert enterprise that was their sworn duty to keep secret.

‘Herb, you’ve never been this quiet.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Next door.’ Treacher looked through the two-way mirror at Dr Wilson. The overhead light was off now, but the shaded bedside lamp illuminated a pale perimeter. ‘He’s on the bed in his boxer shorts. His head is in his hands, and he keeps looking at his watch.’

‘Ainsley?’

‘He’s there. Next bed. He’s asleep. It’s been a tough couple of days.’ He paused. ‘You should come by and see for yourself.’ He didn’t expect an answer and he didn’t get one.

‘What does he know?’

‘He’s a chaperone from Chemical Branch to keep Wilson calm. He’s a chemist, not a bodyguard.’

‘I think we know the danger. We don’t have a choice.’

‘Yes, yes. We know the danger,’ Treacher snapped.

‘Phil, we have to contain this before we fall into a bottomless perdition. We’ve let it go too far. A mistake – yes, my mistake – is about to become an intolerable catastrophe.’

‘An unforgivable mistake.’

There was a pause.

‘Let me remind you that we are at war,’ Weisenthal said. ‘We don’t want to wake up one morning to find this problem has come front and center overnight in big newspaper headlines. War itself is regrettable.’

‘Don’t lecture me.’

‘It’s time to move. We can’t weigh our options any longer. I’ve got clearance. It’s vetted, blessed, approved. It’s now for you to act and the operations team to take care of the rest.’

‘Christ!’

‘Do you hear me?’

‘Loud and clear.’

‘Good. The decision has been made. It’s done. Let’s do what we need to. We are beyond sentiment and regret. Keep your doubts to yourself and do your duty. Move forward.’

Treacher felt anger rise up again, but his memory of their bitter weeklong quarrel was quelled by the inevitable. They were beyond trying to convince each other that one opinion was right and the other wrong. They agreed to disagree. A decision had been made at the top of the Agency, confirmed by Weisenthal, and now he would reluctantly proceed. Treacher felt a cold hollow in his chest where regret mixed with sorrow.

‘We are officially horrified,’ he said, ‘but we move forward. You should have put more thought into your little experiment before we got here.’

‘Water under the bridge. By any reasonable standard of judgment, we were careful – but now, unfortunately, we have an unstable man with state secrets in his head.’

‘He’s a colleague. I know his wife and children.’ Treacher looked through the two-way mirror at Dr Wilson. A lonely condemned figure in boxer shorts slumped on the edge of the bed.

‘What choice is there?’ Weisenthal said quietly. ‘His instability is fresh and speed must answer it. Arrangements are in place.’

‘When does it happen?’

‘Shortly. Leave the door to Wilson’s room unlocked. Ainsley will stay in the bathroom, out of the way. Two security officers will be there in a few minutes.’

‘What do I tell them?’

‘Nothing. They have their instructions. Solid men. Veterans. They know it’s an urgent matter approved at the highest level.’ A pause. ‘Phil?’

‘What?’

‘You okay? Your voice is tired. Have you been drinking?’

Treacher’s mind revolted against the question. ‘Yes,’ he snapped.

‘Get some food in you. Life goes forward. Order room service. Not a good way to spend Thanksgiving.’

Treacher hung up. He was calm and horrified, those two opposing emotions alive in him at the same time. His face had paled, drained even of its scotch flush, and he felt a great thirst in his parched mouth – as if he’d breathed in a desert wind. His eyes had narrowed, and behind the lenses of his wire-frame glasses he appeared to squint. He felt particularly out of place standing in the safe house in his tuxedo, but the call to duty had come suddenly.

Treacher checked the 16mm camera that stood on a tripod in front of the two-way mirror, and he did the same with the Nagra recording deck. Equipment lights were dark, both machines dormant, but out of an excess of caution he unplugged the Nagra and pointed the camera away from the mirror. There was to be no record.

*

The beginning of the end had come unexpectedly, during a Monday staff meeting at Navy Hill Headquarters. Treacher had been discussing the Agency’s liability in the aftermath of its botched effort to test the dispersion properties of bacteriological agents released from a lightbulb dropped on subway tracks, when Herb Weisenthal summoned him from the conference room.

Treacher followed Weisenthal past late-arriving secretaries for whom the presence of the TSS chief on the second floor would be a lively topic of gossip. ‘No reason to start any rumors,’ Weisenthal had whispered, smiling at the astonished women as he led Treacher to the stairwell.

‘How’s the wife? Newlyweds? How long has it been?’ Weisenthal felt it necessary to precede an urgent work matter with a not-quite-cordial personal question.

‘Not long,’ Treacher replied vaguely. ‘When do we stop calling ourselves newlyweds?’

‘When sex slows down.’

Treacher smiled vaguely, refusing Weisenthal the satisfaction of an insight into the state of his marriage. They were unalike – Treacher the Ivy League man with roots in an established New York banking family close to Cardinal Spellman, who mentored Treacher and gave him standing among Washington’s elite. He was well-schooled, well-spoken, well-liked, ambitious, and conventionally patriotic. He had been an aide to the under secretary of state fresh out of law school, special assistant to the Agency’s inspector general at twenty-eight, and his name was among the privileged few of a new generation cultivated by Washington’s social circles. He and Tammy were invited to smart parties with smart people.

Weisenthal was a Brooklyn immigrant’s son raised on a tough street who’d gone to public high school and then a Midwestern state university on scholarship. He found his way into Washington’s burgeoning intelligence bureaucracy with a doctorate in agronomy that was useful for a nation secretly developing its germ warfare capability. He spoke with the determined speech of a recovered childhood stutterer. He was an ordinary dresser, preferring to look like the other men who arrived early to the office and left late. Except for his club foot, which gave him a slight limp, nothing about the man stood out or drew unwanted attention.

‘I haven’t met him before, but I know him by reputation,’ Weisenthal said, answering the question that was on Treacher’s mind. His eyes invited Treacher up the stairwell. ‘He’s in my office. MI6. Very British. Our liaison to Porton Down. Staff intelligence officer. He said he had to speak to us in person.’

Weisenthal’s sparsely furnished corner office had a gunmetal-gray desk, wooden chairs, a sofa, and a glass coffee table with that week’s issues of Time and Newsweek, and against the wall, completely out of proportion to the rest of the room, was a large black combination safe, door ajar. There were no family photographs, no memorabilia, no hint of a life beyond the office except for his brown fedora hanging from a coat stand.

The Englishman rose abruptly from the sofa to greet the two Americans. ‘Thank you for seeing me on short notice,’ he said. His overnight bag was on the floor, and his tan mackintosh draped a chair. ‘Mark Leyland.’ He eagerly thrust his hand forward to Weisenthal and then to Treacher.

‘I didn’t call before I left London. I wasn’t comfortable discussing the matter on the telephone, so I took the overnight flight through Gander.’

A brisk smile parted his lips, half explanation and half apology.

Treacher remembered much of the hour-long conversation, but as with all things that come suddenly and upend your comfortable perspective, he had been skeptical of the case Leyland was making against Dr Wilson. The Englishman’s corpulent bulk was squeezed into a dark wool suit that had wrinkled on the long flight and made him seem comical. Leyland kept touching his cufflinks, an odd tic that distracted Treacher. He was obviously uncomfortable and awkward knowing that he was providing compromising information on a colleague of the two Americans he addressed. That’s what Treacher thought as he listened. He resented being made aware of facts he found distasteful – facts that could not be ignored.

Apparently, Dr Wilson had been in Berlin, where he witnessed the harsh interrogation of an ex-Nazi weapons scientist who had then died. Wilson flew from there to London and drove to Porton Down, where he brought up the disturbing incident with an English scientist who worked in the same field of biochemical weapons research, a man he considered a confidant.

‘He talked about highly sensitive matters, eyes-only stuff.’ Leyland’s tenor voice had deepened. ‘Very inappropriate matters. Our man reported it up the chain. We felt it important to give you Americans a heads-up. These are, we believe, serious security violations.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He had doubts about his work. He was very specific.’

After Leyland left, Weisenthal had taken Treacher aside. That was when the quarrel began.

‘It’s not enough to sit with Wilson and get his view. It’s not enough to remind him of the sensitive nature of our work. It’s not enough that we accept his apology and his mea culpa.’

‘Not enough?’ Treacher had shouted. ‘You hire good men, intelligent men. You trust them to keep their mouths shut. He was talking to MI6, for Christ’s sake. He wasn’t unburdening himself to a stranger. We’re educated men. We have thoughts about the work we do.’

‘There is no learning curve on treason.’

Inside that abrupt beginning Treacher had seen the horizon of possible endings, none pleasant, all expedient. Weisenthal said everything he wanted to say with the numbing repetition of an aggressive salesman. What if he were abducted while traveling overseas? What if he were drugged at a conference in Paris, where he travels three times a year? What if he were compromised? Would he talk? What would he say? That’s what we need to test.

*

Treacher heard the soft tap on the hotel door and then two more muffled strikes in quick succession. Through the peephole Treacher saw two Office of Security men standing in the hallway with the dubious calm of diligent officers on urgent assignment. Treacher undid the door chain and admitted them. He glanced into the hallway, where two women in raccoon scarfs and short skirts escorted a drunk old enough to be their father. The john wouldn’t remember the encounter, and the prostitutes would have every reason to forget it. The girls moved down the hallway in a duet of giddy laughter.

Inside the room, Treacher faced the two men. The shorter one had a boxer’s porcine nose, square jaw, and wide-set eyes that gave him the impression of a man capable of great malice. His taller, younger partner had a kinder rookie’s face overspread with exaggerated confidence. Humble men, loyal men, who had earned a reputation for keeping their eyes open and their mouths shut. They saw the recording equipment and two-way mirror without surprise or question. They were familiar with the room and its purpose. The taller agent looked at Treacher.

‘Mr Arndt?’

Treacher paused. The alias felt like a new suit he had tried on in a men’s clothing store and forgotten to take off. ‘I’m Nick Arndt.’ Treacher repeated the name to own it, implant it, to score his memory for the way he would be known by the two officers. ‘Yes, Nick Arndt. Which one are you?’

‘Casey.’

Treacher had read the two-paragraph note on Michael V. Casey during his evening vigil. He’d glanced at it when he first arrived and again after he’d exhausted his interest in the room’s copies of Modern Screen and Photoplay. Boston College. Wounded in the first days of the Battle of Osan. Son of a decorated Washington Metropolitan police officer. Father of a two-year-old girl. Solid Irish Catholic. Good patriot.

‘And you?’ Treacher asked the second man.

‘Kelly.’

A knock on the door, startlingly loud in the quiet room. Treacher put his eye to the peephole and then quickly opened the door for Ainsley, who stood barefoot in a bathrobe that he tightened with an offhanded movement, closing it where it had opened. He had the wildly disheveled hair of a man awakened from restless sleep, and he was agitated. He looked past Treacher at the two security officers and his concern was amplified by his surprise. Treacher pulled Ainsley into the room.

‘This is Dr Ainsley,’ Treacher said brusquely to settle the men’s nerves.

‘For God’s sake, what’s happening, Phil?’ Ainsley said.

Treacher turned abruptly to the officers. ‘Forget that name. You never heard it. The name is Nick Arndt.’ Treacher flipped open his leather wallet and displayed an FBI alias – proof of who he claimed to be.

Treacher then addressed Ainsley. ‘You okay?’

‘That’s not the right question,’ Ainsley said. ‘What’s going on? Who are these thugs?’

‘The hour has arrived,’ Treacher said. ‘Where is he?’

‘Asleep. Christ.’

Treacher looked through the two-way mirror, but he was too far away and the angle was wrong, so he couldn’t see Dr Wilson’s sleeping form. As he moved closer, the fullness of the room opened up. Dr Wilson lay on the bed under a pale blue blanket, knees drawn to his chest, occupying only a small portion of the mattress.

Treacher calmly rested his hands on Ainsley’s shoulders. He repeated Weisenthal’s instructions. Go back to the room. Stay in the bathroom. Wait for the police to arrive.

Treacher was again alone with the two security officers. He had been picked for the assignment, and the time to question orders had passed. He had not trained for this, but he knew what was required. The shot of scotch he threw back vanquished any doubt that remained.

‘You are now initiated,’ he said to Casey and Kelly. ‘Nothing you will hear, nothing you’ll see, nothing that happens tonight, goes outside this room. Understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Michael, this will be unpleasant. You’re a professional. A patriot. A good Catholic. The man next door is dangerous. Unstable. You saw him in the television studio barefoot and upset. You were kind enough to find his wallet. It’s all very unfortunate, but very necessary.’

Casey nodded. His eyes were wide and steady, but his companion had no reaction whatsoever. Treacher knew where the risk lay between the two men.

‘You have a problem keeping quiet, Michael?’ No, sir. ‘You know what national security is?’ Yes, sir. ‘We are fighting a war, a Cold War, but a war all the same, against a Godless enemy, and our way of life is at risk. Understand?’ Yes, sir.

*

Treacher listened. The lights in the adjoining room were now off, and darkness beyond the two-way mirror obscured the room’s details. What was taking so long? He suck-started a cigarette, but after one unsatisfying pull he ground it into the overflowing ashtray. Again the darkened room. He was alert to sounds, but he heard nothing, and he impatiently clenched and unclenched his fist. His quarrel with Weisenthal was a bad memory that echoed in the quiet of his mind, lengthening the wait. Hellish time. A second became a minute, and one minute became two and then three. The tyranny of waiting.

Suddenly, through the two-way mirror, flashlight beams carved the darkness, bouncing floor to ceiling until they found a sleeping Dr Wilson. He’d shifted on the bed, his knees still curled up to his chest in a fetal position. Amber beams washed his face in hot light, waking him, and he sat up. He blinked, startled and confused, and then loud voices shouted urgent commands. Dr Wilson was rudely made to stand, and the shorter security officer pinned his right arm behind his back, immobilizing him, and the second man guided him across the room. Dr Wilson became violent in the face of his doom. He kicked fiercely, struggled to free his right arm, and made contorted efforts to cling to the bedpost with a grasping hand. Grunts, shouts, desperate cries, and the sharp crack of breaking furniture were muffled by the two-way mirror. Erratically swinging beams caught snapshots of violence. In one moment of illumination, Treacher saw a dark object come down on Dr Wilson’s head. The room was suddenly quiet. Dr Wilson’s slumped form was dragged forward.

Treacher turned away from the two-way mirror, heart pounding. His hands were cold. He closed his mind to what he knew was happening. He counted the seconds until three minutes passed. Trust the plan. Clean up. Get out.

Treacher entered the adjoining room when he found the door ajar. He passed the bathroom and saw Ainsley on the toilet, underwear at his ankles, head slumped, trembling.

Treacher turned on the bedside lamp, and the perimeter of light revealed torn pillows, a blanket crumpled on the floor, a broken chair, and the shattered globe of a standing lamp. Everywhere the signs of struggle. Treacher’s eye was drawn to Dr Wilson’s wristwatch on the bedside table, which he immediately recognized by the dual time-zone face set in a tonneau crystal. He had always admired the polished gold bezel and harmonious lines of the elegant watch. He knew how much it meant to Dr Wilson, and he knew too that a policeman might covet it. He worried that the chain of custody would be broken and it would be lost. He took it for safekeeping.

Treacher became aware that the room was drafty – and cold. That’s when he saw that the casement window was smashed and the drapes were outside, flapping violently in the night. Shattered glass lay on the sill, on the radiator below, and in a debris field across the floor. The window’s inside frame was a sawtooth of broken glass.

Treacher carefully put his head through the jagged opening and saw a luminous White House under the limpid night sky. Dead of night in the sleeping city. Suddenly, an ear-splitting shriek amplified by the dry November air and the early-morning quiet. It was a strange cry of surprise and distress followed by the sharp clap of shoe leather running on the sidewalk. Treacher followed the uniformed doorman as he hurried from the opposite side of the street where he’d been speaking to the driver of a lone Checker cab.

Treacher saw the doorman join three pedestrians who had collected in a tight circle, talking in a blur of excited voices and urgently calling for help from an absent authority. They stepped aside for the doorman, and a mortally wounded Dr Wilson was visible on the sidewalk. Blood leaked from his nose and mouth and stained his cotton T-shirt. His knee was twisted at a terrible angle, and a pale bone protruded from an open thigh wound just below his boxer shorts. Blood pooling on the sidewalk was black in the night. The doorman took the dying Dr Wilson in his lap and leaned forward, but then Dr Wilson’s gasping effort to speak ended, and life left the body. The doorman gently laid him on the concrete.

The doorman backed away from the hotel’s looming façade and looked up at drapes flapping from an open window. He counted the floors so he could know which room the dead guest had been in.

2

Russell Senate Office Building Twenty-Two Years Later

On a grim, rainy Tuesday in May 1975, a fifty-four-year-old CIA officer sat in a packed Senate hearing room and contemplated the perjury being committed by his boss, the Director of Central Intelligence, which, if known, would cost him his reputation, end his career, and possibly put him in federal prison; namely, that the Agency had no records beyond those already produced that pertained to the suicide of Dr Charles Wilson.

Jack Gabriel was with two colleagues in the rear of the room, having sat in the middle of a row to stay as inconspicuous as possible in the circus atmosphere. Tall windows accentuated the height of the hearing room, and ornate brass sconces on the wall behind the curved dais of somber senators added to the formality of the space. A giant pendant chandelier hung from a long cable over the restive crowd.

Gabriel was startled by the director’s perjury, but he did not for a moment feel an obligation to bring it to anyone’s attention. As a long-serving officer, he was compulsively loyal to the Agency and to the man who ran it, and he would remain silent even when it made him complicit in a crime. Their bond had been forged on the anvil of the battlefield.

James Coffin, Counterintelligence, sat on Gabriel’s left, and George Mueller, Plans, was on his right. They were men of stature in the Agency and, like Gabriel, faceless to the world. They were known to each other, but largely unknown to the men and women in the audience. Gabriel’s job in the Office of Inspector General put him forward publicly more than the other two, and more than he liked, but men who knew him faced the witness stand with great interest. Gabriel recognized several journalists who sat together, but it being their job to report on the spectacle and not just the testimony, they glanced around the room, and it was then that Neil Ostroff of the Times spotted Gabriel. They acknowledged each other.

Gabriel had a duty to be present, but he was also there for an entirely personal reason.

Dr Wilson’s family sat together in a row near the front and listened intently to the Agency’s first public testimony on his death. An inadvertent mention in the Rockefeller Commission Report on CIA misdeeds had stirred up the forgotten incident. Maggie, the widow, who’d never remarried, sat on the aisle beside her eldest child, Antony, a psychology doctoral candidate at Columbia, and her daughter, Betsy, a nurse. Mother and son sat side by side, but Gabriel knew of the anger in their relationship.

Wilson’s family was learning several shocking details of his death for the first time. Gabriel had been Dr Wilson’s colleague and friend, so he knew Maggie, and he watched the proud widow react to the new suggestion that Dr Wilson worked for the CIA.

Gabriel was just over six feet and fit, but middle age had filled out his waist and he’d lost his lanky appearance, and gone too was his confident, youthful smile. He was the consummate intelligence officer who had risen through the ranks, dedicated to the CIA’s mission to tell truth to power without shaping it to fit what the White House wanted to hear. No one was more surprised than Gabriel when he realized that, at fifty-four, he had spent his entire career in the Agency. That hadn’t been the career he’d imagined when he was a twenty-two-year-old newly discharged from the OSS, looking toward the far horizon of his life. Lawyer? Investment banker? College professor? Those were the careers he had contemplated, but still the allure of espionage drew him to her bosom. The cerebral challenge of the work, the immediacy of the problems and their complexity, the adventure, and the urgent call to fight the great Cold War against Communism. These were what drew him.

The call to worldly action had been planted in him by a mother who pushed him to excel in school, who did everything in her power to have him see opportunity beyond the small Midwestern town she hated. He was to blossom into an American boy, she said, turning him against his German immigrant father, whose work selling farm equipment took him away from home for weeks at a time. She urged him to leave behind the town, its insularity, the accent, and embrace the great opportunities that college offered. When young Gabriel arrived in New Haven, he carried a bundle of hundred-dollar bills she had pressed into his hand, a fondness for Shakespeare, an affinity for his mother’s Socialism, and a deep skepticism of the rituals of the Catholic Church. The world, he’d been taught to believe, was a dangerous place.

Gabriel’s college friends were the privileged sons of the eastern elite. They talked carelessly of how much money they’d make, the girls they’d take to bed, their gentlemen’s Cs, and the lifestyle they coveted. Gabriel too saw virtue in wealth, but he didn’t aspire to own a lavish home in Southampton or on Park Avenue. He saw no purpose in belonging to an exclusive men’s club in Manhattan or spending weekends with a boozy crowd of amateur sailors on Long Island Sound.

It was in college that his young intelligence matured and his self-confidence grew. He wanted to make a difference in the world. His mother’s radical social views and his father’s cynical disdain for politics combined to shape his own moral compass. It didn’t point to religion, or convention, or any Golden Rule. A lie was permitted, sometimes required.

*

Gabriel looked toward the chairman of the subcommittee, the senator from Massachusetts, who leaned into his microphone. He was flanked by twenty of his Senate colleagues. His eyes widened, and he looked over reading glasses poised on the tip of his bulbous nose, and he repeated in a loud hectoring voice:

‘I will make myself understood. What I asked, sir: Was Dr Wilson an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency?’

‘At what time?’ the director said.

‘At any time.’

‘I believe, Mr Chairman, that I answered that.’

‘And what was your answer?’

‘He was not, as far as I know, employed by the CIA. We knew who worked for us and who did not.’

‘And the records speak for themselves?’

‘The records, such as they are, don’t answer that question, but neither are they complete.’

‘Your testimony is that Dr Wilson, an employee of the Army, was never an employee of the CIA?’

‘It is, Mr Chairman.’

Gabriel alone knew the lie. He also knew that it wouldn’t have been a lie if the director had answered the question a week earlier, before an old memo turned up explaining that Wilson had quietly joined the Agency – ‘safer to have him inside,’ it read. So, as with much of the morning’s testimony, the question was not whether the answer was true or false but when the director had acquired the knowledge that made it true or false. Gabriel had already begun to triage the problem. How ingenious the mettle of the mind, he thought, so supple this human organ that can deceive and hope, and regret and atone, all in three pounds of organic gray matter.

‘Fell or jumped,’ the chairman said into the microphone, his emphasis underscoring his incredulity.

The director had folded his hands on the table like a penitent altar boy. He was impeccably dressed for his hostile Senate questioning – my inquisition, he’d quipped to Gabriel on the drive over. The director’s thinning hair was swept back; his clear plastic eyeglasses disappeared on his face, which had the plainness of a man who could enter a restaurant without catching the waiter’s eye. This man, who had managed death squads in South Vietnam, leaned into his microphone. ‘Is that a question, Mr Chairman?’

‘Yes, it is a question.’

‘Can you repeat it?’

‘Did Dr Wilson fall from the ninth floor of the Hotel Harrington, or did he jump? That’s the question. The investigation, such as it was, concluded that he either fell or jumped. It had to be one or the other. Those two verbs can’t both be true. Did no one question what happened?’

‘It wasn’t a CIA operation. As I said, he wasn’t our employee. He was an employee of the Army stationed at Fort Detrick, and it was a Bureau of Narcotics safe house. I had no personal knowledge of the tragedy. At that time, November 1953, I was stationed in Berlin.’

‘But he was given LSD by the CIA. By…’ The chairman sifted through a stack of papers. ‘By Mr Redacted, who was an employee of the CIA.’

‘Mr Redacted?’

‘Yes, it says “mister,” and the next word is “redacted”.’

Laughter filled the hearing room, and Gabriel too permitted himself to smile. He met Coffin’s eye, and the two men shared the moment’s levity. ‘He’s grandstanding,’ Coffin whispered. ‘He’s got nothing.’

The chairman continued. ‘We will call Mr Redacted to testify when we get his real name, but we do have you now. May I refresh your memory for the public record?’ The senator read from a document that an aide had slipped him. His reading voice was deep and booming, and it quieted the room.