Masquerade (5 page)

“You knew that quickly you wanted to join?”

“I'd always wanted to fight for my country. It was the cold war. Sure, I wanted to join up.”

“No regrets?”

“None.” His face hardened. It was a ridiculous question.

But she wondered whether he was telling the whole truth. There was a tiny difference in his voice, something . . . grim and angry. It was so slight she couldn't be sure. But if she were right, it was one of the rare cracks she'd spotted in the cool, professional face he showed her and the world.

He sensed her appraisal. “Hey, don't get me wrong. Sure, I've had down days, but I don't sit around examining my navel. You can't do that and survive in our business. Remember that.”

Everywhere they went at the Ranch, she secretly scanned faces. What did the Carnivore look like? Where was he? What would she have to do to survive when she met him?

To save her sanity, she focused on one single task—preparing for the operation, whatever her part in it would be. Gordon seemed equally obsessed. She excelled quickly, and she could see his pride. Despite her long, exhausting days, she became stronger and healthier. She had no sense of depression or inadequacy. As her confidence grew, she became increasingly irritated with her daily antidepressant.

One morning at breakfast she asked, “Why do I have to keep taking this?” She looked at the pill he'd just handed her. “I feel terrific. Yesterday I did a ten-mile hike with full pack, for God's sake.”

“That's your body, not your brain,” he answered mildly.

“But it's my brain
chemicals
Dr. Levine said were out of whack. Brain chemicals sound like ‘body' to me. Certainly they're physical.”

He returned his spoon to his cereal bowl and his brown-eyed gaze locked onto her. “Dr. Levine is a brain specialist. Without him, you'd be dead. We don't have time for you to get sick and crazy again. We have an assignment!”

“I seriously doubt skipping one pill as an experiment—”

Something snapped behind his eyes. A flash of fury, perhaps outrage, maybe fear. “Liz, you have your orders. We're almost at the end. I won't let you blow it! Take your pill!”

She blinked. Slowly she put the pill into her mouth, drank her water, and swallowed. His reaction had been a revelation: He blindly revered authority. She recalled the only other time she'd seen him angry. That had been when she'd insisted he tell her the rest of her life story. He'd wanted to follow Dr. Levine's directions then, too, to make certain she wasn't overwhelmed by too much bad news too soon.

He'd been wrong then, and he could be wrong now.

During the rest of the day she considered the situation. The next morning she decided to experiment on her own. At breakfast she pretended to swallow the antidepressant. Instead she spit it into her paper napkin, sneaked it into a pocket, and an hour later flushed it down the toilet.

She had no symptoms of depression all day, and the next morning she again secretly spit out her pill. By the end of the week she was sure her analysis was correct. For whatever reason, her brain chemicals had righted themselves. She took no more pills, and she saw no reason to tell Gordon about it.

The next week she began cipher class. The instructor told them, “I'm going to show you how to use one of the oldest encryption methods—the Playfair cipher.”

Liz spoke up, “But what I read about is electronic espionage. Why bother with something as old-fashioned and slow as a cipher?”

The instructor, a balding man with wire-rimmed glasses, raised his eyebrows at her ignorance.

“Phone and radio transmissions can be tapped,” he lectured. “Electronic signals can be tracked. The NSA spends billions a year doing just that. Those methods are sometimes good, but often they're much too risky. Which brings us back to basics. You'll want to avoid giving a message in person, because you might be overheard, or being seen with your contact might be dangerous. So what do you do? You leave a note at some neutral spot—a dead drop—to be picked up. And to make sure no one else can read it, you use a decipher.”

“I see.”

“Choose a word, any word.”

Without hesitation, she said, “Hamilton.” And immediately wondered where it had come from.

The instructor had her print it on the blackboard. “Five letters across, then start the next line underneath with the rest of the letters.” As the small class watched and took notes, she did as she was told. “Fill out the columns with the rest of the alphabet. Remember, the I and J share the same slot.”

When she finished, she had five letters across and five letters down:

She printed
Got key. Must meet at five
. She returned to her seat.

He showed the class how to break the letters into pairs, eliminating punctuation and spaces between words:

go tk ey mu st me et at fi ve

Then he used the first pair of letters to form the corners of a rectangle on the Playfair square. He chose the replacement
letters from the rectangle's opposite corners, taking the one on the same line as the first letter first. The first pair, GO, became EB.

“After you've encrypted the message,” he instructed, “put the letters into five-letter groups.”

Following his formula,
Got key. Must meet at five
became EBCDG WLRPB AFDOH OGMWD.

She stared at the letters. My God, it worked.

As the class manipulated ciphers, Liz paused. She had an odd feeling in the pit of her stomach. She forced herself back to work, but her gaze kept returning to the blackboard and the word Hamilton.

It was a peculiar choice for an exercise in ciphers, she decided. A person's name, like American statesman Alexander Hamilton, or Lord Nelson's mistress, Lady Emma Hamilton. It was odd how the mind made connections. Those historic figures were part of her recent memory; she'd read about them in history books she'd checked out of the Ranch library.

But she had a feeling the word on the blackboard referred to someone—or something—else. It lingered in her brain, beckoning like a half-remembered song. She stared at the name again and felt strangely, dangerously happy.

Chapter 5

A white August moon glared hot and naked over Washington, D.C. At short intervals after midnight, four men wearing business suits despite the oppressive heat and late hour arrived on the deserted street outside a large neoclassical building a few blocks from the Potomac River. Their cars were ordinary American sedans of the kind driven by almost everyone in the Federal bureaucracy, but each had a driver who stepped out to survey the dark street, then nodded to his passenger, who hurried into the building.

The four men were in their early sixties. Inside, each took an elevator down six levels into the bowels of the building. There they entered a boardroom and sat at a polished conference table. The room was bomb-proof, climate-controlled, and had cutting-edge video and audio equipment. It had been swept for bugs and isolated against electronic intrusion.

Out in the corridor a security guard pressed a button. But a few seconds before the sound-proof door swung shut, a fifth man entered and strode to his seat at the head of the long table. His erect bearing radiated power and authority. His face was patrician, with hollow cheeks and a prominent, thin nose. His flat gaze was fixed in its usual unreadable lines. He was Hughes Bremner, board chairman.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “M
ASQUERADE
will soon enter its final phase.”

The faces of the other four showed no emotion, but tension
hovered in the secret boardroom like an uninvited sixth member. M
ASQUERADE
's success was essential. Its failure would destroy them.

“Is the operation any less risky?” the oldest asked.

“We
are
still trying to eliminate him before he comes in?” It was mandatory the assassin never surface alive in any country.

“Of course,” Bremner said in his detached voice. “But he's gone to ground, and our contacts are coming up empty. There's little chance of neutralizing him while he's out there now. More than ever we need M
ASQUERADE
.”

Lucas Maynard was a heavy man, the group's number one. He sat on Bremner's right and considered the situation: Three months ago the Carnivore had sent word to four nations that he was tired, he wanted out of the post–cold war world of new faces and rules. In exchange for protected retirement, he promised to reveal the details of every assassination and subversion he knew anything about. He was auctioning a priceless cache of the globe's most-secret secrets, and Britain, France, Germany, and the United States were invited to bid.

Hughes Bremner had arranged to represent the United States with the Carnivore's go-between. Immediately he'd run into a problem: The President was reluctant to participate. He'd said he hadn't become President to repeat the lousy ethics of his predecessors, and he'd be damned if he gave sanctuary to an assassin, terrorist, or anyone with that kind of blood on his hands.

With the director of Central Intelligence, Bremner had convinced the President of the Carnivore's value, and the President had given his reluctant permission—as long as the asylum were kept absolutely secret.

The number one, Lucas Maynard, said, “Good thing we won the bidding war, Hughes.”

Hughes Bremner's smile was inside. This was a game few played as well as he. “Yes. Britain and France's recessions have weakened their ability to compete, and Germany has so many problems with neo-Nazis and the East, it has little energy for anything else. We gave the Carnivore everything he asked.” He paused to see the minute signs from his fellow
board members that indicated their relief. “The standard protocols to test his sincerity and intent are in place, and M
ASQUERADE
is fully on schedule.” He looked at each in turn, cool and imperious. “I'll run through the final steps to be sure we all know what we're doing.”

For nearly an hour, Bremner described the groundwork, risks, precautions, and timetable. He showed a video interview with one of the world's foremost brain scientists. When he finished, they sat in the sealed room far below the sweltering streets, each evaluating what he'd heard. Bremner watched them.

“Let's get any doubts out in the open,” Bremner encouraged. “Our lives are at stake.”

The five men talked for another two hours, but in the end they made no substantial changes to the plan. Seldom did any Bremner operation require serious alteration.

It was 4:00
A.M.
when they left the clandestine room one at a time. Lucas Maynard rode up in the elevator alone. He touched the playback button of the ultra-miniature recorder under his suit and conservative tie. He listened to the taped voices of his colleagues, and he smiled.

It was still hot in Washington, D.C., the next morning when veteran CIA agent Lucas Maynard, stout and pink-faced, arrived at the swank Hay-Adams Hotel for breakfast with his old friend, Undersecretary of State Clarence (“Clare”) Edward. Maynard was purposefully early, and for a man of his long experience in covert operations, he was nervous. But he'd been out of the field many years, and he'd never had to worry about his own side before.

Maynard had chosen the Hay-Adams, just a block from the White House, because the restaurant's tables were far enough apart for private conversation. And he'd asked for this meeting because, after more than thirty years, he was about to call in the undersecretary's IOU.

The undersecretary didn't know this. Maynard would have found the situation amusing, if it weren't so damn dangerous.

Mindful of his diabetes, Maynard ordered fruit, oatmeal, and milk. He surveyed the room, checking for anyone from Langley. He recognized no one, saw no signs of listening devices, and spotted no one casually looking in his direction. There was no reason for anyone in the Company to suspect what he planned to do. His motive was known only to him, he was sure of that.