Fidelity (5 page)

8

I
T DIDN'T
take long to find the address of Dee Abbot, fifty-­nine, owner of a two-bedroom house near Patterson Park. Had owned it since 1959, and driving down there Kay found herself wondering what the neighborhood had been like then, if it once held some fragment of the middle-class promise, as much of Baltimore had in the years before the cargo ships had stopped coming into the harbor, and Bethlehem Steel closed, and innumerable other blue-collar businesses had similarly disappeared. If so, it had been a long time since those dreams had rotted. The neighborhood looked like much of the rest of Baltimore: crumbling, vacant houses pushed against occupied domiciles in comparable states of disrepair; liquor stores alternating with the occasional small market, youths and children lounging, looking unfriendly in the late afternoon.

Torres spent most of the ride grumbling about the weather and about never having gotten his promised Reuben, but he was at least as excited as Kay. Most likely this would be another one of the innumerable leads they had been following that would not pan out, time wasted, but it was better than sitting on their hands, the only other option. They parked their car on the street and crossed over a small front yard of weeds and scattered detritus, Torres in the lead.

Kay was raising her hand to the front door when a hole appeared in the wood, and then another, and then she heard that half-familiar
budda-budda-budda
, the sound of a bullet leaving the muzzle of an assault rifle. Then she was flying sideways, ­courtesy of Torres, who had grabbed her from behind and launched the both of them off the stoop and into the comparative safety of the bushes.

They crashed down through them, branches clawing at Kay's face. It took a while to get free of each other, but finally Kay managed to right herself. Torres was saying something, but between the echo of gunfire and the rush of adrenaline Kay couldn't make out what it was at first. “I'm hit!” he insisted. “I'm hit!” And indeed, when Kay looked down, she saw they were both covered in blood and had a sudden flash of fear, thinking that she might have caught a round as well. But no, it was just Torres, a hole in his leg leaking scarlet over her.

Not for long, though. The assault rifle went silent for a moment and Kay was on her feet. A quick glance at Torres suggested he wouldn't die—not just then, at least, although of course everyone has that debt to pay the reaper, and Kay was thinking if she didn't do something quick, then their numbers might both be coming up soon. “Call for backup,” she hissed, drawing her weapon, “and tag him if he tries to come out the front!”

Torres very clearly did not think this was a good idea. “Kay! Kay!”

But Kay wasn't listening; Kay was moving swiftly around to the back of the house. She kept her head down and made sure not to show any trace of herself through the windows, and what she was thinking as she did so—to the degree that she was thinking anything and not simply acting on instinct and training—was that there was no way in hell that James Rashid Williams was going to get away from her twice; no, sir, there was not. They
would be putting one of them into the ground at the end of this, Kay felt with a grim sense of certainty.

Kay had not heard the sounds of an assault rifle since she had been at Quantico. It was the sort of ordnance that even your average Baltimore corner boy—not a species broadly renowned for caution or good sense—recognized. Williams had nothing to lose at this point; it was life in a cell or hold court on his stoop, and the deep-bass explosions echoing from the house made it clear which one he had chosen.

Kay kept her shoulder against the brick, down as low as she could get and still be able to move, maneuvering sideways until she was at the back end of the row house. The assault rifle had gone silent again, although it had left Kay's ears ringing, like she had strayed too close to the front of a rock concert.

“You out there, pigs?” a voice yelled, although before there could be any answer the cannon fired off again. “I got enough for all of you!”

Kay was directly below Williams now; she could almost feel the reverberation of his rifle and tensed her shoulders. Consciously, she could feel nothing but terror—would have told you, if you had asked, that she was too scared to do anything but shiver, certainly too scared to make and execute a tactical maneuver. But that wouldn't have been right: hundreds of hours at Quantico had done their grim work of turning her body into a machine that operated without assistance, a fighter jet on ­autopilot.

The rifle cut off in mid-burst, the familiar
snick
of a weapon jamming, and Kay was upright an instant later, almost unaware of her decision to move on the shooter. She could see Williams through the window—that same furrowed brow, those same dead eyes. He saw her in the same instant, having fixed the jam, and turned the muzzle of his weapon towards her.

Two bangs that were louder than the other bangs—bangs that Kay somehow did not realize for a long moment had come out of her gun; did not realize it until she saw Williams drop his gun and stumble backward, slapping one hand against his chest, then sliding down the wall, leaving a slick of red.

Success had robbed her of forward momentum, confused the instinct on which she had been operating. It took her longer than it should have to break the rest of the glass before climbing in through the back window, covering what she at that point was certain was Williams's corpse with the weapon she'd used to make him into that.

“All clear!” Kay yelled, as if the SWAT team was waiting for her command. “All clear!”

9

K
AY'S GOING-AWAY
party was a raucous affair, even by the standards of the Baltimore Field Office. Monaghan's, the dive bar where the FBI did some but not all of its drinking, had not been closed for the event, although anyone who had happened to wander in aimlessly would have left quickly or found himself pulled into the cheering morass, forced to raise a Natty Boh in a toast to Kay's future in New York.

Whatever ill feeling Kay had produced amongst some of her squadmates—for letting Williams go the first time, or for being a bit
too
gung ho about the mission, a bit
too
willing to stay late and come in early, or just because she had the sort of ­personality that not everyone enjoyed having contact with—had been ­essentially erased with the body of Williams. Even Chapman and some of the others who had never seemed to have a good word to say to her had rallied around Kay after the shooting, as much to show general support as because they were legitimately proud of her.

Indeed, Kay sometimes felt she was the only one in the office who had any doubts about her actions that grim winter day. It was four months since they had shut down the Williams case, which was a happy euphemism for a closed coffin. There had been an immediate review of the shooting by the Bureau's Inspection
Division, and Kay had given up the weapon she had used and been issued a replacement. But she was quickly cleared of all wrongdoing—indeed, it was hard to imagine a more obvious case in which lethal force had been required. They had offered her counseling with one of the Bureau's resident headshrinkers, but Kay, despite her academic experience with cognitive psychology, preferred to keep her feelings to herself.

But sometimes, late at night, she wondered if maybe she wouldn't have done better to spend a few hours talking it through with someone. Admittedly Williams had been a very bad person, a very bad person indeed, and the world was, so far as Kay was concerned, unequivocally a better place without him in it. Still, she felt that perhaps it was a dangerous thing to feel too good about the facility with which she had ended a man's life. It was part of the job, she would remind herself in the early mornings that followed, watching the sun's rays crawl up her window. Part of the mission, and as always, the mission came first.

She was rather more excited about her transfer. Rotational protocols dictated that an Agent spend two-plus years in a small- or medium-sized office before being transferred to a larger one, unless they had been assigned to a large field office after graduating New Agent Training at Quantico. She had liked Baltimore, liked the city: low-key and livable, the people friendly when they weren't shooting at each other. Liked the food and the waterfront, liked the hipster kids up in Hampden, liked getting five-dollar tickets for Orioles games. And she'd liked the office; at least, she liked Torres. More than liked him: respected him, and was glad that she'd had the opportunity to learn from him, and felt confident that she was better for the experience. But New York was home. Christopher was there, and her adopted mother and father, her surrogate family. Not to mention her high school friends, although it seemed a long time since she'd talked to any of them.

The evening dragged on happily till towards midnight it was just Kay and Torres, neither of whom were what could be called strictly sober. Torres had taken to being shot in the leg with impressive fortitude, using it to coax drinks out of everyone long after he was on the mend. Another month or so and he wouldn't even need the cane. Was it good luck that the bullet had not found itself six inches upward, in his knee, or was it bad luck that the bullet hadn't found itself six inches to the right or left and missed him altogether? These were the sorts of questions Kay found herself asking several hours into her farewell party.

“Moving on from us, Ivy?” Torres asked. Slurred.

“Only in body and spirit,” Kay said.

Torres laughed. “And what do we get to hold on to?”

“A fair portion of my liver.”

“We'll take it,” Torres said, “we'll take it. Who you going to be working for up in the big city?”

“Susan Jeffries, in counterintelligence.”

Torres laughed. “You're working for Frowny?” He shook his head as if Kay had just told him she was planning on jumping off something high onto something hard. Then he beckoned the barman for two shots of Jameson. “Good luck.”

“ ‘Frowny'?”

“You never read John le Carré? What the hell kind of spy are you, Kay? Frowny, like Smiley from the old novels.”

“I did read John le Carré,” Kay said, “although none of you apparently did with any clarity, because the joke with Smiley was of course that he never smiled. And besides, his name was George Smiley, it wasn't a nickname.”

“Oh,” Torres said, shrugging. “I guess we're not as clever in the FBI as they are at MI6.”

“A bunch of loose-tongued intellectuals, the lot of them.”

“God bless America,” Torres said.

Two shots of Jameson disappeared down two gullets.

“So it's counterintelligence work for you, then? Going to make sure the Russians don't invade North Dakota? I saw that in a movie once.”

“That sounds like a stupid movie.”

“It was, but I think they remade it.”

“Sounds like the kind of thing they would do.”

Torres laughed. “You're all right in my book, Ivy,” Torres said. From Torres it represented a ringing endorsement. “Not everyone has what it takes to do this job, but I think you do. If you can keep your head down and manage not to piss anyone off.”

“God willing,” Kay said happily, calling for the check.

PART 2

Nothing is more common on earth than to deceive and be deceived.

—JOHANN GOTTFRIED SEUME

10

G
ROUP
C
HIEF
Mike Anthony cupped his hands in the basin, filled them half with water, dumped it and brought his damp fingers up against his hairless scalp. Balding since his twenty-third birthday, homely long before that. Anthony looked at the reflection in the mirror with the sort of unflinching honesty that he had always prized as the foremost asset of the intelligence professional: the ability to see reality as it is, rather than as one might wish it to be. How many otherwise excellent case officers, women of sharp mind, men of firm character, had come to ruin because of this simple inability to identify and adhere to the hard, unpleasant, sharp-edged facts of existence? Insisting all was well when this was clearly not the case, maintaining absolute certainty in their sense of direction even as it led them off a cliff? A truth was a truth was a truth, however unpalatable one found it.

He dried his fingers on a paper towel, threw it into the bin and fixed his tie. No, never a handsome man, not the one you first noticed on walking into a bar, but then again Anthony's was not a trade that prized good looks particularly. Indeed, his sheer unobtrusiveness had proved a virtue on more than one occasion. Once, many years earlier, before he had become firmly ensconced in the bosom of CIA headquarters in Langley, Vir
ginia, when his cover had been blown on some or other ploy in some or other country, the local security services had put out an all-points bulletin for a “bald man in a suit,” a sobriquet that Anthony still looked back on with some pride. Was this not the ultimate compliment for a CIA Case Officer? Faceless and unnoticeable, pulling strings without anyone ever being the wiser?

The ideal, though—like most ideals—was rarely reached. Anthony looked at himself one last time in the mirror, studying the laugh lines around his eyes, deeply etched as a delineation of his character, although he could not have been accused of any excess of jocularity. Not so many more years at this, he told himself, a promise often repeated that would someday need to be followed through on. But not yet. He grabbed his briefcase and went to start the meeting he had been dreading for the better part of a month.

The Associate Deputy Director of Operations was ten years older than Anthony, bumping close up against retirement and doing everything he could to hide it. His hair was the jet-black of a twenty-year-old, but if you were perceptive—and Mike Anthony was very perceptive—you could make out some gray amongst the roots. He wore a suit that was expensive, old-fashioned, out of style but still handsome. He sat at the boss end of a big wooden desk, and he had an unlit cigar in his mouth. Anthony wondered, as he did whenever he had to meet with the ADDO, if it was the same cigar or if he had a box of them in some drawer of the giant bureau, a dozen Churchills well chewed.

“Mike,” he said, gregarious and expansive as ever. “Have a seat, let's talk through this thing.”

“Director,” Anthony said, nodding and accepting the seat.

The meeting was an informal formality. Informal because the ADDO liked it that way: loose ties and first names. A formality
because they had only the one option set before them, and no conversation could get around that fact.

“Sounds like we got a little bit of a mess out there old Moscow way.”

“I think that's exactly what we have, sir,” Anthony answered.

“Tell me about it.”

Which Anthony did then: a retread of what was in the report, all things that the ADDO already knew. Unhappy to do what needed doing, the ADDO would require an hour of cajoling, of pushing and prodding, although in the end he would follow the only course available to them. Resentfully, with some annoyance at the man doing the shoving.

The ADDO did not particularly like Anthony and had made that clear over the years in any number of ways big and small. Anthony had never been quite sure why—some long-forgotten insult, or a simple clash of styles, perhaps. He did his best not to hold the ADDO's antipathy against him. The two things that a lifetime working as a spy had taught Anthony—there were many things but the two main things—were an eye for human weakness, and sympathy towards it. People were not black or white, not good or evil, not one thing or another. They were many things; they were vices and virtues overlapping, sometimes so close that it was difficult to see where one left off and the other began. The ADDO had been a great man once—never an easy man, perhaps never a friendly one, but by the standards of their trade he had been a giant. Coming up through the ranks, Anthony had been weaned on the stories of the ADDO's victories, snatched from the cold hands of his grim-eyed Soviet counterparts.

Time passes. More and more the ADDO seemed out of sync with the development of the intelligence community, which, after the failures of 9/11, had increasingly stressed coordination and
the shared communication of information through the various government agencies tasked with defending the country.

“I don't like it,” he said, after Anthony finished running through what had happened to Dmitri—what had happened and what Anthony wanted to do about it.

“I'm not thrilled about it, either.”

“You're sure there's no other way? Maybe Dmitri got foolish, started whispering secrets in public places after a few shots of vodka.”

Anthony shrugged. Another thing that a full career as a spy had taught him: you could never be entirely sure what a person might do under any given circumstances. “It seems to me unlikely. Dmitri was, if nothing else, a professional. I can't imagine he'd be so sloppy. And all three of them?” Anthony shook his head. “We've got a mole.”

The ADDO let loose a string of profanity that would have been noteworthy for its length and eloquence if Anthony hadn't heard so many variations of it before. “And there's no way we can handle this in-house?”

“If I thought that was a legitimate option, I'd have taken it.” The CIA mandate was to gather and analyze intelligence on foreign entities. Legally it was not allowed to operate within the United States proper. That was exclusively within the purview of the FBI, responsible for counterintelligence gathering inside the nation. In practice, of course, the CIA had not always been known to play entirely according to the strictest rules of conduct, but neither was it set up to coordinate the sort of manhunt that was the FBI's core mission.

“Damn feds,” the ADDO said, which by his standards was actually not even particularly profane.

“They're professionals,” Anthony said. “They've got the resources to handle it, and the personnel. I'm not crazy about
having Agency business spread any wider than it needs to be, but under the circumstances I don't see an alternative.” Of course the ADDO knew all of these things—knew that the situation, for legal as well as practical reasons, required coordination with the FBI. But some people needed to be talked into things they had already decided on, and the ADDO was one of these people.

“And who were you thinking would be best equipped to help us sweep up this mess?”

Anthony made like he was thinking this over, although it was all for show. “Jeffries would be an ideal choice.”

“Frowny?” the ADDO said, like it was the first time anyone had made the joke. Finished being pleased with himself, he mulled it over for a moment. “I guess there isn't anyone better suited.”

There was not, which was why Anthony had suggested her. “She's earned her reputation for competence,” though “genius” would really more accurately describe the common wisdom relating to Jeffries. “And she's not the loose-lips sort, either.”

The ADDO snorted. “No, she certainly isn't.” He thought it over for a while, or made like he was thinking it over. “If we've got to do it, we've got to do it,” the ADDO said finally, in the sort of tone that suggested he held Anthony responsible for the situation. “But I want one of ours up in New York coordinating the effort. Let's just make sure that our . . .
associates
don't take this as an opportunity to go on a witch hunt through the Agency.”

“Who were you thinking?”

“Andrew did good work in Kiev.”

“He did,” Anthony agreed. “It's a different sort of skill set, however.”

“I think he's got the chops to handle it. Besides, it's time he learned something about cooperating with our sister agency. It's
not all adventures in foreign lands. Internal politics is as important as external.”

Which was as good as an order—and would have become one if Anthony had pressed, and so of course he didn't. Another thing he had learned as a spy was not to push a rock uphill if you could possibly avoid it. “I'll put him on it,” Anthony said.

“Good.” The tip of the ADDO's cigar dipped as he nodded his head. “And tell him to keep a close eye on the suits. The last thing we need is strangers going through our dirty laundry.”

Lord knew there was enough of it to find, Anthony thought, nodding and excusing himself out of the office.