Girl of Lies (17 page)

Still nothing in the file regarding the years from his college graduation in 1971 to his beginning of employment at State in 1973. It made no sense at all. His eyebrows began to work uncontrollably, a line appearing down his forehead. He took another drink, then scanned through the background investigation again.

Thompson was granted top-secret clearance based on a report which including
nothing
of the last two years of his life. It made no sense at all. None.

The phone rang. Bear jerked in his seat, then glanced at the phone and picked it up.

“Bear.”

“Bear, it’s Leah.”

He winced. But he kept his tone professional, as always. “Hey, Leah. What’s the low-down?”

“We’re en route with the Thompson sisters to Benihanas in Bethesda. But there’s something weird going on.”

“What?”

“Bear, I think someone has the sisters under surveillance. And it’s professional.”

Crap. Who? “Professional. You mean like intelligence professionals?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t pinned it down yet.”

Bear turned the report to the last page and froze. He narrowed his eyebrows, for just a second tuning out Leah.

Richard Thompson’s background investigation was signed by William Colby.

He shook his head. That didn’t make any sense. Diplomatic Security Services conducted the background investigations for State Department personnel.

William Colby, in 1973, was director of covert operations for the Central Intelligence Agency. In September of the same year he took over as Director of Central Intelligence, just a few weeks before Kissinger took over the State Department.

“Bear?”

“I’m here.”

“What do you want us to do?”

Bear’s heart was thumping. Richard Thompson… suddenly he began to wonder. What was Thompson doing from 1971 to 1973? And why had Henry Kissinger, then the National Security Advisor, written a letter of recommendation for him? Why had a CIA official signed off on his background investigation?

Was Thompson originally CIA? Was he still?

“Bear?” Leah sounded impatient.

“Sorry!” he shouted into the phone. “Listen. Keep an eye out. Don’t approach or attempt to apprehend the followers, all right? Don’t let them know you’ve seen them. Try to get pictures. I want to know who the hell they are. Understand?”

“There’s only three of us here. We’re going to need more backup.”

“All right,” he said. Yeah.
 
If he was right, backup might be needed right away. “Let me make some calls.”

Collins answered the phone again, annoyed this time. They were now two blocks away from his destination. The downtown traffic along Pennsylvania Avenue was a nightmare and he was tempted to just get out and walk.

“What?” Collins said.

It was Filner. Of course.

“Sir, we’ve got a problem.”

“What is it?”

“The Thompson Sisters… they’ve got a tail.”

“Your people, right?”

“No, sir. I’ve got two teams following them. But we’ve got more followers. I’m certain it’s surveillance.”

Collins rolled his eyes. “Who is it? The Saudis?”

“No. British, maybe.”

Collins was angry now. “Give me some goddamn detail, Filner!”

“Sir. Right now the Thompson family… or four of the sisters, plus one of their husbands, are walking together down Bethesda Avenue. They’re accompanied by three DSS agents in plain clothes. I’ve got a positive ID on all three agents. One of them works for us too.”

“Okay…”

“We’ve also got two men, following on the other side of the street.”

“You’re certain they aren’t just pedestrians?”

“Yeah.”

“Our guys are anonymous? Run off the pursuers. Then fill me in later. I can’t talk on the phone any more.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Collins? You can’t stop talking to me
right
now.
” Filner’s voice had an edge.

“Use your best judgment,” Collins replied. Some things superseded even a crisis. This meeting was one of them.

The uniformed secret service agent at the gate of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue approached the Suburban as it rolled to a stop. Collins’ driver leaned out to speak with him and displayed ID.

“I’m going into a meeting that can’t be interrupted,” Collins said, his eyes on the White House.

“Go ahead to the West entrance, sir,” the secret service guard said.

Collins’ driver pulled forward onto the grounds.

Dylan Paris had been walking slightly behind the four sisters. Something had set him on edge, and even though they were only walking four blocks to the restaurant, he felt as naked as if he were on patrol in Fayzabad again. A cold breeze, just a slight remnant of winter, blew up the street as they turned onto Norfolk Avenue. The restaurant was two blocks away. It was a few minutes before six-thirty, and the sky was just beginning to dim. Full sunset wouldn’t be for another hour.

He scanned the street again. Across from them and slightly behind, two men were walking. Normally it wouldn’t have bothered Dylan, but one of them kept eyeing the sisters. Too many times for comfort. Both of them wore nondescript grey suits and one of them spoke on a telephone. Of course the street was crowded with other people: workers leaving their offices, a few scattered soldiers from Walter Reed, men and women headed to rendezvous and happy hours.

He turned and walked backward for a second. He caught Leah Simpson’s eye and discreetly pointed toward the men across the street.

She nodded. “Already on it,” she said in a conversational tone. “We need to get you guys inside. But slowly. Let’s not alert them, all right?”

“Alert who?” Alexandra asked.

The other sisters stalled, and Dylan spoke in a low, even and tense voice, “Keep walking, relax. Don’t. Panic. Andrea, can you tell us something funny? Have any good stories?”

Andrea looked frightened for just a moment, and Dylan thought she wasn’t going to be able to hold up. But she clenched a fist and began speaking. Her voice started out shaky.

“When I was fourteen, Uncle Luis took me to Rome. That week changed my life. Abuelita always took me to church. But it was different. Rome was
different.
”

She paused for just a second. They kept walking as she tried to formulate her words. Dylan found himself scanning everyone on the street. A man in a t-shirt and jeans stood in the doorway of a shuttered Thai restaurant near the Starbucks. He was smoking a cigarette and talking on a phone, running his left hand across the stubble of a buzz cut. Was he a potential kidnapper? Who was it that went after Andrea in the first place? Why were the guys across the street following them? Or were they, even? Maybe they were just checking out the four Thompson sisters—all of them highly attractive—across the street. After all, they stood out. Andrea and Carrie were both six plus feet tall, and Sarah had those bizarre black markings outlining her scars. And Alex… Alex was still the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life.

And right now, Alex and her sisters were potentially in danger. Without even realizing it, Dylan was walking and thinking like a soldier again. Despite his injuries more than two years before, despite the fact that he was long out of the military, now he walked along, his eyes scanning everywhere, ready to act, ready to
move,
when he saw it coming.

Andrea was still speaking. “When I looked up at the ceiling in the chapel… you can’t believe how beautiful it is. This was the work… the work people built to raise up to God. To praise him.” As she spoke, the enthusiasm clearly shone through her words. This wasn’t just a story—she believed in what she was talking about.

The two men across the street. One of them broke off, approaching the guy in the doorway with the buzz cut and the phone.

Buzzcut dropped his phone. He didn’t close it, or switch it off—he just dropped it. And his hands kept moving.

Without a moment’s thought, Dylan shouted, “Get
down
,” then grabbed Alex and Carrie’s arms, pulling them low behind a car parallel parked beside the street. Leah Simpson did the same with Sarah and Andrea. As Dylan lowered himself behind the car, Buzzcut appeared to drive something into the stomach of the approaching man.

Gunshots rang out.

B
EAR WYDEN HUNG UP the phone. Tension filled his body, a need to get up and move. After Leah’s call, he’d immediately contacted the DSS offices and dispatched additional agents to Bethesda. But it was highly unlikely they would have anyone on site in time to affect the situation. Whatever the situation was.

Right now he had to wait.

He didn’t want to fucking wait. Bear was a cop, not a desk jockey. And that was his ex-wife out there. And whether he liked it or not, he had to sit here and wait. He needed to calm down and focus, not go charging into the situation.

So he turned back to the Richard Thompson file, with new questions. Was Thompson CIA? Or had he been? Had his work at State somehow been cover for something else? He’d retired from the Foreign Service twelve years before. So it seemed likely that he was pursuing a dead end looking through ancient documents, when the most likely reason for all this attention was his appointment as Secretary of Defense.

On the other hand… Secretary Perry had personally handed him these documents. And he wasn’t known for doing things on a whim.

So he reviewed the file and immediately saw an unusual pattern.

In Indonesia, Richard Thompson was detailed as a protocol officer for five years—an exceptionally long assignment. Then he was back at Main State for three years, followed by an assignment to Spain that barely lasted eleven months. That was highly unusual, but might be related to the fact that he’d apparently met and married a woman there.

A quick review of her file from 1981 revealed nothing terribly interesting. Adelina Ramos was young when they got married, the daughter of a florist in Madrid.

Thompson had no performance evaluation for his posting to Spain. The next move in his career was a surprise, given that he had a new wife and child. In 1982 he was posted to Pakistan. For… slightly less than two years.

Bear rubbed his forehead. He’d reviewed a lot of personnel files over the years. And he’d almost never seen a pattern like this. Foreign Service assignments were typically three years, exactly. But it fit the theory that Thompson was CIA. During the early 80s, the US Embassy in Pakistan had more intelligence officers than diplomats. Which meant he probably spent most of his time off doing classified work in Afghanistan or God only knew where else. Those years were some of the bloodiest following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

He thought back to the early 90s, when he knew the Thompson family. Ironic that Richard Thompson hadn’t recognized Bear, but not that surprising given what he knew about the character of the man. In 1992 Richard Thompson had been a remote figure: arrogant and dismissive. He’d been argumentative too, insisting he knew more about the security arrangements than was normal for diplomats.
 
His wife had been a pain in the ass too, but in a different way, demanding to know intimate details of the security operation. She struck Bear as anxiety prone, worried unnecessarily about details far beyond her purview.

He remembered the oldest daughter, Julia. At the time she was ten years old. Curly brown hair. The loneliest little girl he’d ever seen. When he made the security arrangements, he’d assigned the youngest Marine in the detail to her. The two became fiercely attached, and Bear remembered all too well seeing her tagging along around the Embassy with him, usually in the garage where he’d somehow wrangled the space for three classic cars that he was always working on when off duty. It was an embarrassing waste of manpower to have a US Marine effectively babysitting a ten-year-old girl, but it was also important. The younger daughter, Carrie, also had her own guard.

When the assignment started, Adelina Thompson had insisted on interviewing the personal guards, an hour long ordeal for each of them that left the Marines sweating. She might have been a tiny, young and inexperienced woman, but she’d been fiercely protective of her daughters and made sure the bodyguards knew it.

In retrospect, it was interesting. The order to provide a protective detail to Thompson’s family had come from Main State, but Bear couldn’t recall the circumstances. It wasn’t exactly normal, and Leah had asked him about it. Years before their marriage, she’d been assigned to the protective detail. It was unusual enough she’d asked about it.
Orders
from Washington
.

She’d been right to wonder. Security details were routine, but dedicated security details for a specific family? That was unusual indeed. He made a note to look into it.

The phone rang. Bear snatched it up. “Bear.”

“Bear, it’s Leah!” The words came at a fast-pitched shout and he shot out of his seat. “Shots fired here. We’re moving the family back to the condo now.”

“Wait. What happened?”

Carrie didn’t, at first, pay much attention to Dylan when he suddenly became alert, walking backwards, scanning the street.