Blindfold Game Page 3

  “Time was I wasn’t married to her.”

  “And,” Kyle said, unheeding, “she was never going to be satisfied with shore duty. You knew going in she was going for her own ship as fast as she could, and you barely got through graduation before you married her anyway.”

  The silence stretched out. “Hugh?”

  Hugh sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Yeah. I knew.”

  “Besides, it’s not like you aren’t a fart in a skillet your own damn self, always going three different directions at once in your job.”

  “Yeah, Kyle, I think I’m going to let you go as my marriage counselor, you’re not exactly inspiring me with hope here.”

  Kyle said simply, “Who else you got?”

  Kyle Chase and Hugh Rincon had been two of a trio of friends born in a coastal village in south-central Alaska. The third was Sara Lange. All three of them were children of successful fishermen, and all three of them had been expected to follow in their fathers’ footsteps on the decks of their respective family vessels. All three sets of parents had been vastly disappointed, and if a childhood of getting into as much trouble as humanly possible hadn’t formed an unbreakable bond, then the joint sufferance of massive parental disapproval certainly had. Hugh laughed shortly. “No one. Apparently.”

  “Not true. You’ve got me, and you’ve got Sara. You’ll always have me. Question is, will you always have Sara?”

  “I’m not sure I’ve got her now.”

  “Be good to find out.”

  Hugh looked at his desk, piled high. “I’ve got to get back to work, Kyle.”

  “Yeah. You might want to think some about that, too.”

  “Tell Lilah and the kids hi.”

  “Will do. And Hugh? All you have to do is figure what’s more important. Sara? Or your job?”

  Kyle hung up, which was all right, because Hugh didn’t have an answer for him. His assistant, plump, perky, bright-eyed Marie, stuck her head in the door. “We ordering out for lunch, boss?”

  He looked at the clock to discover that four hours had passed. “Oh. I guess.”

  “The usual?” When he clearly couldn’t remember what the usual was she elaborated. “Turkey and cranberry sauce on sourdough, side salad with blue cheese, chips, and a bottle of water.”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay.” But Marie lingered.

  He looked up. “What?”

  Marie’s look admonished him for his abrupt tone. “Are you going to see her or not? She’s been waiting all morning.”

  “Who’s been waiting all morning?”

  “Arlene Harte.”

  Hugh sat up straight. “Arlene’s here?”

  Marie huffed out an impatient breath. “I left you a note.”

  Hugh picked up the soapstone bear. The note, stained with coffee, was stuck to the bottom. Arlene Harte here requesting an audience with His Nibs. Marie’s neat handwriting had even made a note of the date and time, that morning, 7:55 a.m.

  “Shit,” he said, and got to his feet.

  Arlene was sitting in an anonymous anteroom just off of one of Langley’s equally anonymous hallways. Hugh had long thought that the idea behind the decor or lack thereof was that if the barbarians ever got inside the gates they would be incapable of finding their way through this much bland to any worthwhile target.

  “I’m sorry as hell, Arlene,” he said. “I missed seeing your note until now.”

  She smiled and stood up. “No problem. Finished the Sunday New York Times crossword while I was waiting.”

  He took it from her. “So you did, and in ink at that, you slimeball.” They shook hands warmly. “Come on in. Coffee? Tea? Wait a minute.” He stuck his head back out the door. “Marie, make that lunch for two.”

  “Gotcha, boss.”

  Arlene settled herself in the chair across from his desk. “Thanks for seeing me without an appointment.”

  “Anytime, Arlene, you know that.” He smiled at her. Bad mood or not, he was always very nice to Arlene. A comfortably sized blond in jeans and blazer over a white turtleneck, she looked like someone’s youthful grandmother. In truth she was anything but. Retired from the Associated Press after a thirty-year career reporting every global conflict from Vietnam on, she was spending what was commonly referred to as her golden years as a monthly columnist for Travel + Leisure. She was unmarried, without children, made her home in a one-bedroom walk-up in Georgetown, and seemed comfortable with the choices she had made in her life. She spoke French to the Paris-born and was famous for never missing three square meals a day in any war zone. It wasn’t a bad resume in the spy biz. “How’s the job?”

  “They pay me to travel around the world and write about it. What’s not to like?”

  He laughed. “I want to be you when I grow up.”

  “So do I.”

  “What brings you home, Arlene?”

  She let her smile fade. “You know I was in Pattaya Beach the day of the bombing, right?”

  Hugh looked at her. “Really,” he said. “I didn’t know, as it happens.”

  Her mouth tightened. “I was afraid of that. I sent my report in by way of the American embassy in Bangkok. I knew when I didn’t hear from you that you’d probably never gotten it. Diplomats.” The word was an epithet.

  “Squared,” Hugh said with feeling.

  “That’s why I came in when I got back.” Without hurrying, Arlene unwedged an envelope from a battered leather bag on a short strap designed to hug her shoulder. Hugh had never seen her without it. He had been curious enough one day to rifle through it when she was out of the room and had excavated a reporter’s notebook, her passport, a lone Visa card, a fistful of Travel + Leisure business cards imprinted with her name, her office phone number, her cell phone number, her fax number, Marie’s phone number, Hugh’s phone number, and a Hotmail e-mail address to which Hugh had an icon on his desktop with the password already programmed in. He had just excavated a twelve-pack of Uniball gel pens with medium points when she came back into the room.

  “Where’s your computer?” he had asked, and she had laughed and told him she had accounts in cybercafes from Bakwanga, Zaire, to Galahad, Alberta. “Cheaper than trying to find a tech when your computer freezes up.”

  “And a lot harder to trace,” Hugh had said. “Why so many pens?”

  “Two reasons. One, you can use pens for currency in a lot of third-world countries.”

  “And?”

  “And I might run out of ink.”

  Marie brought in the sandwiches and drinks. Arlene waited for the door to close behind her before laying out a row of photographs across Hugh’s desk. They ranged from clear to indistinct, and once Hugh mentally filtered out the background noise in the way of waiters and drinkers and diners and Arlene, smiling at the camera with her curly hair frizzed into steel wool from what appeared to be a high level of humidity, they featured four men sitting at a table in front of a white sand beach with a strip of blue ocean beyond. He fished a magnifying glass out of a drawer and ran it over their faces. Two of them in particular drew his attention. “Hey?” he said, with a gathering sense of incredulity.

  “Which one?” she said.

  “The skinny one on the right.” He punched up a file on the computer and typed in a name. A mug shot flashed on screen. “Noortman, Jaap Junior.”

  Arlene gave a satisfied nod. “Our friendly neighborhood international pirate.”

  “Is-” His voice failed him. Arlene waited, her expression somewhere between expectant and joyous. “Arlene, is Fang the guy sitting on his left?”

  She nodded, a grin breaking out. “I wasn’t close enough to catch the whole conversation, but I definitely heard Noortman call him Fang.”

  Hugh dropped the magnifying glass and stared at her with something approaching awe. “Holy shit, Arlene. I don’t think we’ve got a photo of Fang. And we sure as hell don’t have one of the two of them together.”

  “You do now.”

  Hugh didn’t grudge her the
satisfaction he heard in her voice. As far as she was concerned she could have retired at full pay on this one photograph alone. He took a self-indulgent moment of his own to congratulate himself once again on being smart enough to hire her.

  They’d met three years ago, when Hugh had been seated at Arlene’s table at a mandatory second-banana appearance to support the director when he spoke to the National Press Club. From the subsequent conversation Hugh had deduced that writing a travel column wasn’t going to keep Arlene interested for very long. He’d asked for her card and called the next day to invite her to lunch at a small Indian restaurant, where she ordered the hottest curry on the menu. Her eyes hadn’t even teared up. Hugh had recruited her on the spot. She was one of three in his private stable of informants, all personally recruited and trained and all of whom reported directly to him.

  The new big thing in the intelligence community was satellite surveillance, and much was made of the ability to read the license plate of a truck from low earth orbit. Hugh relied upon it himself every day on the job, but when it came right down to it, there simply was no substitute for the human eye, informed, trained for detail, and on the scene. He had chosen his operatives because they were multilingual and already widely traveled, with an inborn predisposition to head straight for trouble and an equally inborn lucky streak that enabled them to get out of it again with minimal damage, to themselves or their nation.

  At which time they would call Hugh, or e-mail him, or show up in his waiting room, and his files on the pace of construction of nuclear weapons facilities in Iran or what Russian arms dealer was selling off surplus AK-47s in Bryansk or which Pakistani general was plotting an attack across the Pakistan-Indian border increased by another piece of information. It was almost never a vital piece in and of itself, but each piece fit into a larger puzzle whose growing picture helped him see what was going on in the world beneath the headlines on CNN. In his job he needed to know what was going to happen, not what already had. He was an analyst, a synthesizer, a spider sitting at the center of a web, recording each distant vibration of silk in an effort to predict from what direction the next threat was going to creep.

  He laughed at this flight of fancy.

  “What?” Arlene said, startled.

  “Nothing. Sorry.” Fang and Noortman having drinks on a Thai beach with two unidentified Asians was definitely something he needed to know more about. “Go ahead,” he said with an encouraging wave. “Tell me the tale.”

  Arlene folded her hands neatly in her lap and reached back for the memory of that terrible day.

  She’d been in Pattaya Beach to write a column on single destination resorts going up in the area and had been wandering around in search of local color. She’d been a little over a block away from ground zero when the balloon went up. Her voice remained even and matter-of-fact, but it was clearly an upsetting memory.

  Hugh made a comforting noise and nodded encouragingly.

  “There were these two guys.” She pointed at the photos. “Asian for sure, Korean I’m thinking. Everyone else is screaming and feeling for where their eyes or their balls used to be, but not these two. They’re standing there, not talking to each other, not helping anyone, just taking it all in. It-” She shrugged. “They looked, I don’t know, wrong. So I followed them to a bar on the beach. Pretty soon this guy shows up.” She pointed at Fang. “Then Noortman appears, and I remembered that day we spent going through your bulletins.”

  Hugh nodded again. One of the many reasons he had recruited Arlene was the fact that she literally never forgot a face, whether she saw it in person or posted on the wall of a post office.

  “So, I got out my camera and told the waiter I wanted to take some pictures to send home to my grandkids. I talked to him in French and even though he informed me that my accent was odieux and my grammar horrible, hein, what could one expect of les americains after all and du moins I was trying, so he agreed to pose for a few pictures of himself so that I’d have a memento of that day on the beach at Pattaya.”

  He looked at her purse. She grinned and opened it up to produce the tiniest digital camera he’d ever seen. “I’ve added to the armory.”

  “So I see, and lucky for us.” He looked back at the photos. “Did you follow Fang?”

  She shook her head. “That meeting looked a lot like somebody was hiring somebody else. I figured it’d be better to follow the boss. Looked to me like the boss was those two, so I followed them to Bangkok, and from there to London. They stopped in Bangkok long enough to acquire clothing and one piece of luggage each,” she added. “And before you ask, they bought their tickets through a travel agent that day, on a credit card that is paid off out of a numbered account in Riyadh. I went back and checked.”

  “Yeah?” He looked again at the photographs, and at the two men with Fang and Noortman. Something nudged at his memory and he chased it down, a report in from another field agent a week, ten days before. He looked up at Arlene. “What were they doing in London?”

  “Passing through.”

  “Where were they headed?”

  She looked a little embarrassed. “I lost them at Heathrow.”

  “Come on.”

  “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “How do you mean?”

  She pulled out a Visa card and held it out. “My company card was refused at the ticket counter.”

  He took it automatically. “You’re kidding me.”

  She shook her head.

  He could feel his face getting red, the curse of his mother’s Scandinavian ancestry. He hit the intercom button with unnecessary force. “Marie? Get Arlene a new Visa card, will you? Ready for her by the time she leaves. No credit limit and no expiration date. My authorization, priority one. If you have any trouble with accounting, route it through miscellaneous operating expenses, Asian desk.”

  Marie kept the books for his office and knew as well as he did that his operating expenses were maxed out, but she didn’t even consider arguing. “Okay, boss.”

  “Thanks,” Arlene said. “I was able to see where they were going.”

  “The Koreans? Where?”

  “Moscow.”

  “Moscow?” Hugh said. “Moscow, Russia?”

  “It wasn’t Moscow, Idaho.”

  “And this was in- What day was the bombing?”

  “October fifth. Why?”

  “No reason,” he said, and added with real feeling, “Dammitall, any-way.

  She knew what he meant. “Yeah. I tried to bribe their names out of the ticket agent, but I must not have had enough money. She called them Smith and Jones.”

  “Ha-ha,” Hugh said.

  “Yeah. She tapped the photos. ”I don’t have anything to back me up here, Hugh, but I’ve got a nasty feeling about these two guys. I think they did it.“

  “What?” Hugh said, but he already knew.

  “I think they’re the ones who set the bomb on Soi Cowboy.”

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  OCTOBER 20,

  HUGH ARRANGED FOR ARLENE to dictate her report in full, had it transcribed, and the next morning presented himself at the office of the director. He was shown in almost immediately. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency served at the pleasure of the president of the United States. Appointees in the past had run the gamut of ability from intelligent, experienced bureaucrat with time served either in one of the services or the agency itself to clueless sycophant with deep pockets, the better to give large campaign donations.

  The current occupant of the big office had some pretence to experience, having been deputy director during the last Republican administration, but he was also a very rich man who had contributed heavily to the reelection of the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and he tended to trim the sails of his agency to a course somewhere between political expediency and effective operations. His employees made ruthless use of his ready access to the Oval Office and largely ignored him the rest of the time. He was perfectly aware of thi
s, and so long as they made him look good he was willing to tolerate it, generating an atmosphere of mutually assured disdain.

  Hugh’s view was more cautious. This was a man who had survived the fallout of 9/11, which had rained down a great deal of grief on the intelligence community in the form of departmental inquiries, internal investigations, and congressional hearings, not to mention the scrutiny of the press and the wrath of the public. The director had the ear of a president who to all appearances was about to be reelected by a respectable majority. Further, he had served four terms in the House of Representatives in administrations both red and blue, during which he had made connections he maintained to the present day over a series of breakfast meetings. At these breakfasts he presided over a judicious distribution of titillating tidbits of information concerning the personal peccadilloes of various heads of state. If that wasn’t enough, he played tennis with the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee twice a week when they were both in town.

  No, what the director lacked in experience and ability he more than made up for in moxie. Hugh treated him with a deference he kept sincere enough to allay any suspicions the director might have that Hugh was actually more in charge of his section of the agency than the director was. In his turn the director appreciated Hugh’s intelligence, ability, and tact. They both got a lot more done that way.

  “Hugh,” the director said as Hugh came in, and stepped around his desk to give Hugh a warm handshake and a hearty slap on the shoulder. “I haven’t seen you since you got back. I read your report, of course. Well done, well done, indeed.”

  In truth it had been a nightmare of a trip, thirty briefings in FBI field offices around the nation in fourteen days, the last of which had been Anchorage. He’d written the report on the plane home, so it was nice to know it was coherent. “A series of briefings on the Asian political scene to other agencies merely, sir,” Hugh said.

  “A dispensing of information, rather than a gathering of it?” the director said with an avuncular twinkle. Hugh agreed to this without wincing, and they disposed themselves respectively in an overstuffed couch and a matching easy chair, both in soft brown leather that was as comfortable as it had been costly, and chatted about various matters while they waited for the coffee to be brought. When it arrived the director poured, not forgetting to add cream and sugar to Hugh’s cup. No small measure of his success was due to his capacity for remembering details.