A Game for Assassins (The Redaction Chronicles Book 1) (41 page)

The investigation quickly gathered pace and if it was to go any further, Dempsey and Wellings would need access to the holiest of holies – officer's files direct from the personnel department of the Admin Division.

Filching and examining agent files was all very well, but for CIA officers to have access to their colleagues' personnel sleeves required the direct authorization from the DCI himself. After much wrangling and a few veiled threats by mentioning the DCI's office, the Director of Admin finally capitulated on the clear understanding that any files would have to be viewed in a secure room under the control of the Admin offices.

Wellings took on the role of assessing their new target's personnel file and armed with a notepad and pen he sat and began to dissect the file relating to one of the most senior men at the CIA.

“Find something out of the ordinary. I know that's not going to be easy, given Higgins' prolific role in having an overview of the Directorate of Plans operations. Trust your gut instinct, look for something askew, something that started out as one thing, but turned into something else completely,” said Dempsey.

Higgins' file seemed to be that of the archetypal CIA man during the 1960's. Private money, OSS background during the war, moved over to the Office of Policy Co-ordination with Frank Wisner before it changed its name to CIA.

His career had been on a steady trajectory upwards in various locations around the world, before he'd made his place in the Plans Directorate. In his fifties now, he was riding high as the second in command of the operations arm of the CIA.

As the Assistant to the Director of Plans, his range was far and wide. He could intervene in an operation, had authority to alter or change a mission, and his seniority dictated that he was listened to. Wellings spent the next hour searching through his file, searching for that one lead. He noted several possibilities down, but then later discounted them as being average and not 'askew' or 'out of the ordinary' as Dempsey had stated.

By the end of the second hour, there were still three notations left on his pad. The first was in relation to a blackmail operation against a Bolivian diplomat; the man had been kidnapped by his own people and had simply disappeared off the face of the earth.
No,
thought Wellings. It was too vague and way off from any European-related operations that this case was a part of. He scrubbed it out with his pencil.

That left the final two. One was to do with a shooting in Poland several years ago, in which a network had been blown and a CIA case officer had been killed. Wellings vaguely remembered the talk around the office about it, but as Polish operations were light years away from the fighting down in Cuba, it had, to him, been nothing more than coffee break talk. It seems that Higgins had decided to open up an investigation into the killing and given himself the role of lead investigator in the case. Unusual for the ADP to get directly involved in such an investigation.

The other was in relation to a possible Russian Intelligence defector who had decided he wanted to come over to the West and live the good life. Higgins had seemingly become embroiled in the case and decided to overrule the defector team which had travelled to see if the man had any 'bones' to validate his claims. The defector team said he was an A Grade source, Higgins argued that after meeting him, he'd judged him to be an agent of disinformation and so on the ADP's orders, the case had been dropped. The Russian had later been found dead.
Well, that was interesting,
Wellings thought, -
decides to come over to us one day, then six feet under the next.

Wellings circled the two notations on his pad and drew a straight line from one to the other. A connection; maybe? But what it was, he had no idea. Yet. He would need to dig deeper into the files again and look at a murder in Warsaw Zoo and the tragic life of a Russian Intelligence defector by the name of Anatoli Galerkin.

* * *

“Galerkin was one of the shrewdest operators who approached us in the Helsinki Station. When he got in touch, he definitely had his capitalist businessman's head on.”

Troy Dempsey was drinking excellent coffee in the sixth floor offices of Renner & Stone Law of Chicago. His host was Joe Stanhope, junior partner and former CIA intelligence officer.

“Oh, don't get me wrong, he was a pain in the ass to deal with on a day-by-day basis. He was very high maintenance and if he'd lived, I could have imagined the debriefing team stateside getting a bit rough with him,” continued Stanhope. “But the stuff that he was going to bring us was going to be top drawer, or so he insinuated.”

“Top drawer how?” asked Dempsey.

Stanhope lifted his feet down from his desk, where he'd been laconically relaxing. He was young and smartly dressed; his only concession to a relaxed look was removing his jacket in his office. Stanhope, after a successful five years with the Agency, had decided to return to his first love, being a lawyer. The offers, the prospects and the money were just too good to ignore, especially after the way he and his colleagues working on the Galerkin case had been treated.

“Oh, we had snippets of the rundown of the local KGB Stations in the geographical area, which was nice, some material relating to the intentions of the Politburo towards the Scandinavian countries. Good stuff, just enough to whet the appetite and establish Galerkin's bona fides. Then of course, there was the shooting in Poland. You know about that, of course you do, otherwise you wouldn't be here. That's when Higgins got involved.”

Dempsey smiled a 'gosh-shucks' kind of grin, as if he'd been found out. “Can I just ask, Joe, prior to the ADP being involved, how was the Galerkin case going?”

Stanhope nodded. “Just fine, perfect in fact. We were doing everything right running our agent and Galerkin was doing everything right in getting the best deal for himself that he could. Then he started getting the shivers and the nerves kicked in. He claimed people were watching him, his own people, and they were ready to grab him.”

“And were they?”

“Who knows? Nobody knows for sure, but we hadn't seen anything of the kind. That's when the talk at our meetings turned from Galerkin being an agent in place, to wanting to defect overnight.”

“So what did you do?”

“We stalled him, like we do with all defectors. Buy some time and give him the usual excuses; it will take some time, red tape, legal considerations. Anything to keep him hanging on in there for a while longer.”

Dempsey had done similar with his own agents in the past, part bullying and part coercing them to remain active rather than wanting to jump ship because they'd gotten a little spooked.

“Then he started to take the information he claimed to have to another level. Big stuff, he said. That's when he began to talk about his knowledge of the shooting in Poland, plus one or two other pieces of intelligence that he thought would tempt us. We cabled Langley and asked for guidance.” Stanhope told the rest at a staccato rapid fire pace. A cable back from Langley, someone from the Plans Directorate had an interest in the case, partly the shooting in Poland investigation and partly to see if Galerkin was worth taking seriously.

“The whole team was cock-a-hoop. Helsinki isn't exactly at the sharp end and yet we'd managed to get ourselves a genuine KGB defector who wanted to come over to us and who had a stash of hard information that he was going to bring out. Roll out the gravy train, or so we thought.”

“Then what happened?” asked Dempsey. Wellings had already briefed him on what was in the files before he had stepped onto the flight to Chicago, but he wanted it direct from the former case officer's mouth.

Stanhope frowned. “What happened was that we gave Higgins one session with our guy, and the next thing we know, he's pulled the plug on the operation. We got a cable back from Higgins at Langley, saying that our guy was a fraud and we were to drop him like yesterday. We were pissed at that. So, Grimes, the Chief of Station, gets on the war drums and sends back a terse reply.”

“Obviously it didn't work.”

“No. Grimes was just letting off steam, we all were, but he was pro enough to know not to screw with headquarters once they'd issued a directive. Langley told us to watch our mouths and toe the party line. So we did what any team of CIA spies do when the going gets tough. We went out and got drunk. We all had a hell of a hangover the next day.”

Dempsey smiled. He liked Stanhope, would have probably enjoyed working with him.

“It was a moot point, anyway. We'd been warned off by Higgins or the DCI or Langley as a whole and then we got the news.”

“What news?” said Dempsey, although he imagined he knew what the other man meant.

“Galerkin had been found dead. Murdered in the same hotel room where we'd had our last meeting. FUBAR,” said Stanhope grimly.

Dempsey stood and looked out at the mid-afternoon sun bathing the streets of Chicago. “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition, indeed.”

“After that, well, there really wasn't much to do. All the intel that Galerkin had passed to us was pretty much ditched. The analysis back from Langley was that it had all been fraudulent or scraps anyway, so no big deal. The fact that Galerkin had been killed just added more weight to the argument that he was probably a bit of a flake and unreliable. We always assumed the KGB thugs had gotten him.”

“Did you take it any further with Langley, about Galerkin being the real deal?” said Dempsey.

“I tried several times, but my messages were either ignored or just brushed aside as me being resentful. Finally, I got a warning from Higgins to stop. It was the usual series of veiled threats; bad for business, bad for my promotion, bad for Agency morale, so just shut up, Stanhope!”

“Maybe he was right. Maybe Galerkin was a bad egg.” Dempsey let the thought hang in the air for a second or two before continuing. “Unless you have something else that could back up your hypothesis.”

Stanhope twirled his office chair around and glared at Dempsey. “Can I just tell you something, Troy? I used to love the Agency. The people, the operations, the challenges. I felt at home there. I would have taken a bullet for any of the guys I worked with.” He stood and walked across to Dempsey, so they were face-to-face. “But what I can't stand, is the fact that in those last few months, I spent more time fighting my own senior officers than I did the Russians. That kind of sticks in my throat.”

Dempsey understood perfectly. “So I'll ask again, Joe. Is there anything else, or is this all just sour grapes on your part?”

Stanhope shook his head. Dempsey thought this was the way he would behave when he was giving a closing speech in court. “I don't work for the Agency anymore, Troy. I'm out and all the better for it. The most I have to deal with in the back-stabbing business is having the senior partners not invite me to all the client parties and functions, but that's nothing compared to having a bunch of CIA stiffs try and screw me over. Especially when I know that something doesn't add up. Besides, if I do give you what I think… sorry, know… then I don't want the strong arm of the CIA weighing down on me.”

“Look, if you're concerned about your name being linked to this, or some senior people in the Directorate of Plans giving you a hard time, then don't. I have the ear of the DCI; this comes all the way from the top,” said Dempsey reasonably.

Stanhope took in Dempsey's face for a moment longer, trying to read him. “Alright, here's what we'll do. As they say in the legal business, let's retire to my private chambers. Then we can talk.”

* * *

Stanhope's private chamber was actually the roof of the building.
Clever,
thought Dempsey.
Hard to carry out surveillance on, nobody around and nobody to overhear them.

He had barely made it to the top of the access stairs leading onto the roof when he felt the forceful push from behind. The blast sent him sprawling onto the gravel of the flat roof, and then he was yanked backwards so that he was facing the sky and felt the needle sharp tip of a knife pressed against the side of his throat. He froze; keeping his hands where Stanhope could see them, because the last thing he wanted was to have the former CIA man slit his throat through a misunderstanding.

“Don't move, Troy, keep still. It's not personal. I just need to be sure. Are you wearing a wire?” said Stanhope as he ran his hands over Dempsey's waist, up his chest and down the crease of his back.

“Don't be an asshole, Joe, of course not.”

But Stanhope continued on with the search until he was satisfied that Dempsey wasn't hooked up. “Okay, you're clean, you can stand up,” he said, slowly backing up and keeping the blade out front of him… just in case. “Now Troy, you're going to want to kick my ass, but let's not do this, okay. Friends?”

Dempsey stood up, dusted off his jacket and straightened his tie. He took a deep breath and looked over at Stanhope. Probably in his position he'd have done much the same thing. Better to be safe than sorry. “Where the fuck did you get a prison shiv from anyway, Joe? You're a member of the legal profession.”

Stanhope tucked the blade back into his shoe where it had been concealed and smiled. “Hey, this is Chicago. Capone may be long gone, but it's still a rough place, even more so for lawyers. It pays to have a little bit of an equalizer handy from time to time.”

Dempsey flung out his hands in exasperation and stared around at the Chicago skyline. “Well lookee here, I'm not wired and no one else knows that we're up here and I have authority from the top man at CIA himself. So can you please stop dicking around and tell me what you know?”

Stanhope nodded and motioned to the wall of a heating vent. Sit down, he seemed to be saying. Both men sat and watched as the late afternoon sun gave the city buildings a honey colored hue.

“It was the night following the meeting between Higgins and Galerkin. As I mentioned, the team were on a high. Galerkin was doing his stuff and all we needed was for Higgins to give us the green light and the cogs of the CIA would have kicked in to secure our defector in place operation. Grimes phoned Higgins' hotel and asked to speak to him. Nothing official, just to invite him for a drink that evening before he flew out the next day. We got no answer, so I decided to call around to the hotel and pick him up. You know how these things work; you get a boss in town from headquarters and you're expected to wine and dine him and show him a good time. Plus, the rest of the station was in a celebrating mood, so we thought why not.”