Hunter: A Thriller (13 page)

Everyone broke into smiles and excited chatter. Kate Higgins rose unsteadily and shuffled toward him. He stood to receive her. He took in her white hair, her ravaged face. She reached out and grasped his hands; in his, hers felt tiny, delicate, and lost.

“God bless you, Mr. Hunter,” she said, smiling through her tears.

He couldn’t say anything.

He felt another set of eyes on him. He looked past her and saw Annie Woods watching him intently from across the room.

*

After the meeting broke up two hours later, he shook hands all around. It wasn’t a coincidence that he found himself leaving at the same time she did. They said their goodbyes to Susanne at the door.

They strolled casually, side by side, toward their cars. The bright moon cast tree shadows across the pavement of the cul-de-sac. Deep in the wealthy residential neighborhood, only the sounds of their footfalls broke the eloquent silence. He felt an electric tension rising between them with each step.

She broke it first. “It’s wonderful. What you’re doing.”

He looked at her. She wouldn’t meet his eyes; hers remained focused straight ahead as she walked.

He said, “Susanne is fortunate to have someone as loyal as you in her life.”

Her expression seemed to change, but she didn’t reply. As she reached her car, she pulled out her keys and unlocked it remotely.

You can’t get involved.

“I was wondering,” he heard himself say, “if you’d like to have dinner this Friday evening.”

She stopped. Didn’t speak for a moment. Then turned to face him. The moonlight bared what he thought was a hint of fear in her eyes.

“Dylan, I like you. But I hardly know you. And—”

“—and when you get to know me better over dinner, maybe you
won’t
like me.” He knew he should stop. He couldn’t. “But at least you’ll have had a great dinner.”

The fear was obvious now. “I really shouldn’t.”

Let her go.

“I really shouldn’t either. But I don’t seem to care.”

“Tell me you’re not married. Or involved with somebody.”

He couldn’t help but laugh. “No, Annie. I’m not married. And I’m not involved with anyone.”

“Then why do you say you shouldn’t?”

“For the same reason you do.”

“You’re scared?”

“Terrified.”

“Terrified? Of what?”

“Why don’t we reveal our respective fears over dinner?”

She laughed. He did, too. It broke the tension. He asked for her number and address. She told him. She asked why he didn’t write them down. He told her he never had trouble remembering truly important things. She laughed again.

He loved her laugh.

He followed her around to the driver’s side. It was a physical effort not to touch her as she slid into the seat. Then to refrain from touching the window when she looked up at him and smiled.

She started the car and pulled away into the night.

He stood there in the middle of the empty street, watching until the car rounded a curve and its red tail lights winked out.

On the way to his own car, he found himself humming a Cole Porter tune. In his head, he could hear Frank singing it in his iconic style.

Then Frank got to the part about the warning voice in the night, repeating in his ear.

He sat motionless behind the wheel. The voice, suppressed during the previous hours, was loud now.

Yes, you damned fool. Use your head. Face reality.

Cold logic always served him well. Cold logic now told him this couldn’t end well.

But he had been alone such a long time.

He turned over the key, gunned the engine, wiped out the nagging voice.

Tonight, for once, he didn’t give a damn what cold logic said.

CIA HEADQUARTERS,
LANGLEY
,
VIRGINIA
Thursday, September 11, 9:40 a.m.

“Annie.”

She was arrested by the familiar growl of Grant Garrett behind her, and she turned to face him. He stood in the hallway, feet planted apart, hands jammed in his trouser pockets, just outside the exit doors of the auditorium. His tall, lean, unmoving figure forced the crowd emerging from this year’s 9-11 memorial ceremony to separate and flow around him. Like Moses parting the
Red Sea
, she thought.

She approached him, wading against the tide of people. “What’s up?”

“Let’s get some fresh air.”

They wound up in the central courtyard, right outside the main cafeteria. No sooner had he left the building than he pulled out a pack of
Luckies
and lit up. He coughed with his first drag.

“I thought you wanted some fresh air.”

He made a face at her. She kept pace as he strolled without speaking. Just as his medium gray suit matched the sky, his chilly expression seem to reflect the fall temperature.

They wandered over to the
Kryptos
sculpture. The iconic piece stood in the northwest corner of the courtyard. Twelve feet high, made of copper, petrified wood, and granite, James Sanborn’s famous art work looked like an S-shaped scroll, lying on edge. Its blue-green copper surface was perforated, top to bottom, with dozens of rows of alphabetical text, which contained four encrypted messages. Since its installation in 1990, only three of the messages had been cracked by top code experts; the fourth remained unsolved.

Garrett took a seat on a red stone bench, facing the cryptic wall. He patted the bench and she sat beside him. At their feet, and driven by a hidden pump, water swirled in a bowl-shaped pool. For a while, he smoked and gazed absently at the puzzle looming before him.

“We need to rethink this thing,” he said finally.

“I know. We’ve spent six months, and we’re still going around in circles.”

“There’s a solution to this. But I think one or more of our basic assumptions has to be wrong.”

“What are we assuming?”

“All kinds of things. First, motive: that somebody wanted to silence Muller before he talked. That would imply the Russians. But how would they find out where he was taken? That implies opportunity: another mole at
Langley
, probably high-ranking, who could direct Muller’s assassin to the safe house. But we assume the shooter is also almost certainly American, not Russian, because of the Barrett rifle and the hotel signature. Which implies that the shooter is probably somebody from inside the Agency—either SAD or the Office of Security—because those are the only people with the training and willingness to follow extreme orders issued by a CIA boss. Which also implies that he has to be an active-duty person. And that he could be an ex-Marine sniper, also because of that hotel signature.”

“Well, I did what you asked,” she said. “I went through the personnel records of SAD with a fine-toothed comb. Even if one of them had some reason to act on his own, only a handful of those guys were in this area at the time of the shooting. None with Marine sniper backgrounds. Then I discreetly checked out everybody in the Office of Security, too. Some knew about the site, of course, even though they didn’t know what it was for. But Grant, the bottom line is, none of that matters. All the SAD and OS staff have air-tight alibis for that morning.”

He nodded. “While you tackled it from the bottom, trying to find the shooter, I approached it from the top, trying to find the mole. And I’m dead-ending, too. To sign off on something as extreme as a hit—let alone a hit on
U.S.
soil, which is illegal as hell—you’d need a presidential finding. That White House order would be sent directly to the people down the hall from me, then go through me for implementation. Nobody beneath me could initiate or pull off a full-black op like that on his own, because nobody below
him
would follow orders that drastic without double-checking right back up the chain of command. There are just too many procedural sign-offs along the way.”

“So if a mole set the hit in motion, it doesn’t look like the shooter could be somebody in active
U.S.
service.”

“Which would seem to lead us back to a Russian hitter, tipped off by the mole. Except for one other thing: It doesn’t seem as if there
is
a mole.” He stared into the swirling waters at his feet. “Annie, I’ve checked more ways than I could begin to tell you. The list of possible candidates isn’t long, and it was easy to rule out most of them. For the few left on the list, I set some tempting traps, ones that any mole working for the
Russkies
wouldn’t be able to resist stepping into. Info that he would’ve transmitted right away to
Moscow
, and that they would’ve reacted to, pronto, in ways I could track. I started laying those snares at the start of our investigation, half a year ago.”

“And nothing?”

“Nothing.” He rose and stepped over to a white granite block near the base of the sculpture. “We can eliminate anybody in the FBI, too, because they didn’t know about the safe house until after the hit. Not even your weenie pal,
Groat
. So, I’m virtually sure there’s no mole.” He tapped the rock with the sole of his shoe. “And if there’s no mole to tip off
Moscow
, then we can rule out a Russian hit. Just as we can rule out an American in active service, acting on his own.”

“So, by process of elimination, what does that leave us? We’re left looking for a skilled sniper; somebody who’s not Russian; somebody who’s also not on active duty in the
U.S.
military or in the Agency—”

“—but who still somehow could find out about a top-secret CIA safe house.”

“Grant, the number of people like that would have to be vanishingly small.”

“I know,” he said. He tapped at the boulder harder, with his heel, while staring up at the monument to cryptology. “Damn it, I should be able to figure this out. I somehow feel the answer’s staring me right in the face. But I’m missing something.” He glanced at his watch. “Oh hell. I’ve got a meeting in the Corner Office. Look, we both have other responsibilities, but let’s stay on this. At least it’s a relief to know we probably don’t have another mole.”

“But it’s no relief to know we still have an assassin.”

CLAIBOURNE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY
CLAIBOURNE
,
VIRGINIA
Thursday, September 11, 2:59 p.m.

Adrian
Wulfe
didn’t like Ed Cronin’s face.

They sized each other up across a small round plastic table in an interview room. Both the table and the molded plastic chairs in which they sat were bolted to the floor, and
Wulfe’s
left hand was cuffed to the arm of the chair. He knew the guards who brought him here were posted right outside the door.

Usually, these sorts of things didn’t matter. He could almost always rattle somebody just by staring at them. He learned the trick when he was a kid on the streets: Don’t blink. You look at somebody, but you don’t blink, and after a minute or so it scares the crap out of them. He did it now.

But Cronin continued to look serene and unflappable. The guy’s light-blue eyes remained locked on his own, cool and steady. And he didn’t do any of those nervous things with his hands or feet or lips.

Not likely to shake a guy like this, put the fear into those eyes. Not a good idea, anyway. Not if you want to get out. Time to play nice.

“I’ll be happy to help you if I can, Detective Cronin,” he said in reply to the cop’s previous question. “Of course, given my present circumstances”—he smiled and swept his free hand to indicate his surroundings—“I doubt that I could know much that might be useful to you.”

The cop didn’t respond to the smile. Just stared at him a minute before speaking.

“Oh, I don’t know about that. I checked the phone records here a few minutes ago and learned you’ve had several recent calls from the late Mr.
Valenti
. So I’m figuring that maybe before he got himself whacked, he might have told you if somebody threatened him. Or Bracey.” He paused. “Or you.”

Wulfe
made show of looking off into space, frowning, trying to think back. “No...not really. Jay-Jay didn’t mention anything of the sort. No threats, no problems. He seemed happy, for once. He was looking for work, you know. He told me that he was trying to stay out of trouble and steer clear of anyone who might draw him back into it. So frankly, I was surprised to hear that he had been killed.”

“Surprised? Even after Bracey’s murder?”

Careful.

“Surprised and shocked. I felt right away that their deaths couldn’t be a coincidence.”

“That’s why I wonder if anybody has threatened you lately,
Wulfe
.”

He shook his head. “No one from outside, and no one in here.”

He thought the cop would buy the lie. In fact, from the minute he’d heard about
Valenti
, he remembered that Hunter guy and what he said. But Hunter was just a paper-pusher, not street muscle. Even if he had the balls to try something,
Valenti
would’ve had the guy for breakfast.

Still, for a few seconds, he toyed with the idea of telling the cop about the threat, anyway. Get the prick investigated, maybe kicked off the newspaper. Payback for
dissing
him in print, and then to his face.

But no. Much better to take care of it personally. And much more fun. Once he was out, he’d look up the guy. Show him what happens to anyone who crosses Adrian
Wulfe
.

He made a mental note to add him to the list. Right along with those two bitches.

“Funny, though. You look like you’re thinking of someone.”

It startled him. He liked to think of himself as inscrutable. “Oh. No...not at all. I was just remembering Jay-Jay. It’s depressing. Sure, like me, he had his share of problems. But he was sincerely trying to change.”

Cronin threw his head back and laughed at him. “Yeah, sure. Just like you.”

His wrist jerked taut against the handcuff. He was suddenly glad of the restraint. It had prevented him from hurling himself across the table and snapping the bastard’s neck.

Instead, he forced himself to smile. “I know it’s hard for you to believe me, Sergeant Cronin, but I—”

“No,
Wulfe
,” Cronin interrupted, rising to leave. “It’s
impossible
for me to believe you.”