Masquerade (10 page)

But if she were Sarah Walker
and
Liz Sansborough, why wasn't Sarah Walker's data simply copied from Liz Sansborough's?

And how could the face with the small chin and no mole be explained, particularly since it was identified as belonging to Sarah Walker?

Then she saw an entry about a Great-grandmother Firenze, who was both Sarah and Liz's great-grandmother, which meant she was also the grandmother of Jane Sansborough Walker and Hal Sansborough. As she read, an image of an energetic, white-haired woman appeared in her mind, and she smelled spicy spaghetti and freshly baked bread flavored with rosemary.

Her heart hammered with excitement. She closed her eyes and tried to hold onto the image, but it was like trying to grasp soft butter.

Damn. The vision vanished as quickly as it had come.

Another real memory?

Yes! It must have been! Great-grandmother Firenze!

She read on. Sarah had attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, edited the university newspaper, the
Daily Nexus
, graduated, and done a stint on the
Santa Barbara Independent
. Living on money inherited from Great-grandma Firenze, Sarah at last had broken into magazine free-lancing.

How could she explain what seemed to be her own personal “memory” of Great-grandma Firenze, when it appeared her family—the Sansboroughs—had never visited Santa Barbara?

Maybe Great-grandma Firenze had visited them in England, and she'd made up the rest of the memory.

Was there a real Sarah Walker out there somewhere? Someone who looked like the woman on the computer screen? If so, what had happened to her?

Thinking about it gave Liz chills. She sat for a long time in the glow of the computer in the dark room.

At last she scrolled back to the beginning of the file. She memorized the Santa Barbara telephone numbers of Sarah Walker, Hamilton and Jane Walker, and Michael Walker.

And then she turned off the computer and headed for the door. This time no one waited outside. She thought of the strange spectacle yesterday of the personnel director driving around the circle in the camp garbage truck, listening to the baseball game at full blast.

As she crossed toward her cabin, she noticed a cluster of pinpoint lights to the southwest—a mountain village that wasn't on the road she and Gordon had used to drive to the Ranch; they had come in from the southeast. The lights were only a few miles away but seemed a different universe.

On their way to her first class the next morning, Liz stopped at the women's john. Gordon headed around the corner toward the men's side. Once he was out of sight, she double-timed to the administration building where a public telephone stood outside. She dropped in coins and dialed Sarah Walker's number in Santa Barbara. After four rings, a computerized voice told her the number had been disconnected. She tried Sarah's parents' number in Santa Barbara. A woman answered.

“Mrs. Walker?”

“No. What number are you dialing?”

When Liz told her, the woman explained she'd had the number only three months.

Disappointed, Liz glanced at the men's room door from which Gordon would have to exit. He'd have his back to her. She dropped in more coins and dialed the number of Sarah Walker's brother, Michael. The telephone rang and rang. No one answered. She hung up but was reluctant to leave. Why? It took her a moment . . . and then she knew what it was.

She'd heard two almost inaudible clicks just before she'd hung up. She double-timed back to meet Gordon, feeling a sinking fear. The camp's only public telephone was bugged. Now someone would know she was still investigating Sarah Walker.

Chapter 10

As Washington's beltway began to swelter from the hot morning sun, Lucas Maynard arrived at the bench under the cherry trees where undersecretary Clare Edward waited impatiently.

Maynard had a plain manilla envelope tucked under his arm.

Inside the envelope were documents he'd copied the night before from a fireproof safe he kept locked under Leslee Pousho's bed. Leslee had slept on unaware as he'd slipped out and then returned from an all-night copy shop. The safe was his, and she had no idea what was in it. He'd promised to show her soon, and she trusted him enough to wait. As a precaution he'd given her Clare Edward's office and home phone numbers. If anything happened to him, she was to turn the safe over to the undersecretary.

She hadn't liked the thought of something “happening” to him. But he knew eventually she'd grow disenchanted with all the problems that came from having an overaged, reformed spy for a lover. She'd want to move on to a relationship where there were no secrets.

If he didn't want to lose her, he'd have to get out of his messy life as soon as possible.

The documents he was delivering to the undersecretary gave the secret points of origin of some $10 million in Iran-contra money he and the others had skimmed off drug profits and dumped into no-questions-asked numbered accounts at BCCI.
Once the money was in the BCCI system, it was anonymous. But he had a paper trail that proved the accounts had later been cashed out and invested in OMNI-American and Nonpareil International Insurance.

Neither man spoke.

They carefully studied everything around them.

Maynard casually laid the envelope on the bench. He got up, walked away, and disappeared among the trees.

When Clare Edward arrived at State, the ordinary manilla envelope under his arm, he hurried into his private office without giving more than a glance to the man with a stiff face and roaming eyes who was talking to his redheaded secretary. She waited until the undersecretary had passed, then smiled up at the young man who had been dropping by often lately. She found him amusing, a brother, not a potential boyfriend, which was a refreshing change.

He handed her a bouquet of roses.

“They're beautiful.”

“How about a bite of late breakfast?” he suggested.

“Now the boss is in, I've got tons of work to do. Sorry.”

Undersecretary Clare Edward sat grinning behind his antique walnut desk in his walnut-paneled office. His blood raced with excitement because he was reading Lucas Maynard's documentation.

It was everything he'd hoped for and more.

He recognized no names on the list. Probably dummies, but they'd be traceable. And the account numbers and descriptions of arms and drug sales were more complete than any the Iran-contra prosecutors had been able to confirm.

He telephoned the Secretary of State's office, reached his top assistant, and pleaded urgency. The assistant gave him an appointment for 10:10 the next morning.

For the rest of the day the undersecretary worked with only
half of his mind on what he was doing. When Maynard finally called that afternoon, Edward's cultured voice reverberated with bonhomie.

“This is the real stuff, Lucas. I've made an appointment with Warren in the morning. Get the rest of your information ready. If it's as hot as this, we're going to have some fun.”

Lucas Maynard's voice was bristly. “Nothing more until I have a deal. Full immunity.”

“Excellent.” Hughes Bremner was at his desk at Langley, and Gordon had just telephoned to relate the good news about the woman's twenty-one-mile test. “You've done a fine job bringing her along. How'd she take the extra mile?”

“Furious about being tricked, then extremely proud she'd pulled it off.”

Bremner chuckled. Pride. Her undoing. But the vanity that would destroy her would also make him successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

“How is her behavior overall, Gordon?”

“She's calmed down, sir. All she ever found was dead ends. No way she'll ever break into the database again.”

“She's no hotshot hacker.”

“No, sir,” Gordon agreed over the long-distance wire. “When do you want me to start her on the next stage?”

Bremner considered. “I'll be in Paris tomorrow. Back home the next day. Start then. I want to be here to stay on top of this. Meanwhile, remember, we can't afford to have anything go wrong. Especially when we're so close.”

At noon a transcript of the telephone conversation between Lucas Maynard and the undersecretary arrived in Bremner's office. Bremner read it with growing anger and alarm.

Lucas Maynard was demanding immunity, and the undersecretary was taking Maynard's information to the Secretary of State!

Bremner felt a sudden chill.

What exactly did Maynard know? What was he trying to sell that required immunity? It couldn't be the French operation. Not even Bremner's board knew about what would be the greatest operation of his career—G
RANDEUR
. He'd already given them so much, he saw no reason to cut them in on this, too, and G
RANDEUR
would be his ultimate triumph. It would shake Europe to its smug foundations and leave the United States reeling. But Lucas Maynard knew enough. The details of Sterling-O'Keefe alone would destroy them all, and G
RANDEUR
with them.

Again he studied the transcript and its short appended report. One of Bremner's agents, whose assigned territory included State, had been keeping an eye on Undersecretary Edward. He'd reported the undersecretary's hurried arrival at his office with the manilla envelope, and the transcript of the phone call had confirmed its significance.

But neither surveillance nor Bremner's agent at State had been able to determine where Maynard disappeared for hours at a time. Bremner could delay no longer. He was going to have to take care of this himself.

Years ago he'd begun holding afternoon coffees in his austere seventh-floor office. Invitations to these gatherings were coveted by ambitious underlings. He was near the top, and he doled out news and career suggestions with the precision of a Las Vegas odds maker. Everyone knew wooing Bremner paid off.

He telephoned Maynard and invited him up for coffee. “Just us, Lucas,” he said smoothly.

Maynard agreed. A refusal would have made Bremner wary. They both knew that.

In ten minutes Maynard was at his door. “We haven't talked in a long time, Lucas,” Bremner greeted him, gesturing graciously toward the sofa and chairs grouped around a slate-topped coffee table at the far end of his office. Beyond the grouping, through the office windows, spread the sea of Virginia woods.

“You've been busy, Hughes. We both have.” Maynard sat in a chair with its back to the timbered landscape, not the door.

“You've lost weight.” Bremner poured coffee into Haviland cups.

“Twenty pounds so far. For the diabetes.”

“Ah, yes.” Bremner set the full cups on the slate table. He laid a linen napkin beside each. Halfway between them he put out cream and sugar, in matching Haviland china, and a sterling tray of sandwiches. He'd arranged everything himself, having found the personal attention made his guests feel more important and amenable to suggestion.

“I've been thinking about Sterling-O'Keefe and M
ASQUERADE
.” Bremner sat across from Maynard, where he could look through the windows to the world. “Do you have any misgivings?”

An alarm went off in Maynard's head. They never discussed Sterling-O'Keefe at Langley. Never. Was something else going on? Something Bremner wanted to keep quiet? Or had he discovered what Maynard was up to with the undersecretary?

But the veteran agent sipped his coffee quietly. “That's an odd question, coming from you. Sterling-O'Keefe is your baby. You've made us rich as Midas. Why would I have misgivings?”

Bremner smiled. “You tell me.”

Maynard put down his cup and crossed his arms over his heavy chest. “No misgivings, Hughes. Except about myself. Getting old. Maybe it's time to hang it up.”

“Retire?”

“It happens to us all.”

“Except the stars in the lobby.” Hughes Bremner never forgot the simple, five-pointed stars carved into the wall down in the entrance lobby. Each of the nearly sixty stars symbolized an operative who'd died in the line of duty, but only half were listed in the honor book nearby. The other heroes' names remained as secret as their fatal missions. The words carved into the marble above the stars said it all: “In honor of those Americans who gave their lives in the service of their country.”

Service. Country. That's why Hughes Bremner—and all the men who'd come aboard in the '50s—had joined Langley. They'd been idealists. As for himself, Bremner would have given anything to become one of those stars. In those early
cold war days, he'd longed for it. Not death but glory, heroism. Back then the United States had known her enemies, and she'd had the guts to pursue them. Relentlessly.

The 1980s were different. When Bremner organized arms sales to Iran and drug sales to the United States to finance the contras
—contrarevolucionarios
—in Nicaragua, new U.S. laws made him a criminal. That's when he'd finally acknowledged his once-glorious country had been on a three-decade trip into the dumper.

The grand United States of America had been ruined, made pussy-weak by radicals, do-gooders, and liberal Congresses.

He'd come to a painful realization: No point in his going down, too. It wasn't
his
country anymore. It was time to take care of himself. For the split second of that final decision, he'd felt what it must have been to be that blackbirding forebear of his, a renegade. In that instant, too, a new, soul-altering conviction had given final shape to his destiny: If he was going to do it, he'd go all the way. Make himself so rich, so powerful, no one would ever be able to touch him again.

As head of Mustang, Hughes Bremner was a CIA division chief, a feudal king with a fiefdom. The top people—the director of Central Intelligence and her three deputy directors—had too much to supervise. They blessed division chiefs like Bremner with their confidence and expected them to operate independently, with no one looking over their shoulders. It was a prescription for personal profit and Bremner and his four deputies were no fools. The notorious case of KGB mole Aldrich Ames had simply made them more careful. Every problem had a solution; every rule had a loophole.