Shark River (17 page)

I felt an empty, rolling nausea in my stomach, and my voice sounded hollow when I said, “That means nothing to me.”

Harrington had become increasingly confident. “Of course it doesn’t. Just interesting reading, that’s all. So make up your mind. You really want me to continue discussing it on this phone line?”

I looked at my watch. Tomlinson and Ransom would be sitting in the Tarpon Inn, waiting. They’d have to eat without me.

I told him, “Give me half an hour. I’ll call you from a pay phone.”

 

 

Instead of taking the ferry across to the mainland, I fired up my little yellow Maverick flats boat and flew across Charlotte Harbor at sixty miles per hour, blasting a geysering rooster tail as I trimmed the Yamaha outboard, crossing ankle-deep bars and flats, translating my irritation into speed.

I’d call the man, but from a place he wouldn’t expect. It was way too easy for someone with the right connections to bug or place surveillance on every pay phone within several miles of the ferry landing.

So, instead, I ran across the bay to the little island village of Boca Grande, tied up at Mark Futch’s seaplane dock and walked the quiet tree-bordered streets downtown. I found a pay phone just across the street from the Temptation Restaurant and watched through the window as Annie served beers to a bar full of fishing guides.

I straightened my glasses and dialed the phone. Harrington answered immediately. He seemed much less formal, no longer on guard. “You on the mainland, Ford?”

“It’s what you told me to do, isn’t it?”

He chuckled. “Once again, bullshit. I’d be disappointed if you could be bullied that easily. But you
are
at a pay phone. That’s my guess. You’re too smart to call from anyplace else.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Not that I don’t believe you, but with all the technology these days, who knows? I’ve got a scrambler here on my office line that converts our voices from analogue to digitized, then back again. But know what I think? If I can have it electronically converted one way, any hotshot with the right computer program can have it electronically changed the other way. Which is why I maintain faith in the basics. Are you at a wall phone or in a booth?”

“It’s bolted onto the side of a building with chrome shielding.”

“Try to peek into the conduit that comes up from the ground. There should be a wire in there. An insulated wire, probably beige-colored.”

I looked and said, “A standard payphone, yes. A crèmecolored wire comes up into the back.” I knew why he was asking, but made no comment. The man seemed to know his business.

“Plain old-fashioned telephone wire, something that’s easy to understand and monitor. Let me check my meter.” There was a pause. “Okay, my line’s secure here, and no trace of resistance on yours, no drop in voltage according to this little computer of mine, which means we can say anything we want about anybody we want and it goes no farther. Just between you and me.”

I replied, “Guess I’ll have to take your word for that.”

I was still watching the fishing guides through the window of the Temptation, but I was also maintaining a peripheral eye on the street, too. Watching for slow-moving cars. Watching for men moving on the tops of buildings.

If I’d been set up, I wanted to see it coming before it was too late to react.

There wasn’t much for me to see. It was a nice, balmy winter day with the smell of frangipani drifting above warm asphalt. A few blocks away, beyond the beach at the end of the street, was open ocean. A quiet afternoon. Boca Grande doesn’t get a lot of traffic. It’s way off the regular tourist track. A rich little tropical outpost with the atmosphere of a Vermont village.

Harrington started by saying, “If you’re the man I think you are, you have an impressive record, Doctor Ford. Or should I call you Commander Ford? If they gave out medals to people like you, I suspect there’d be a couple of important ones on your uniform. If they allowed people like you to have uniforms.”

Was he fishing, or did he really have proof? I said, “Then I’m not the man you think I am. What I don’t understand is, you said something about helping Lindsey. But you’re not talking about Lindsey. So what’s the point?”

“The point? The point is an operation called Sky Hook. Ever hear of it?”

The words jolted me. I hadn’t heard them spoken in years. There was now no doubt that Harrington had found some hard-copy files. Absolutely no one outside our small team was supposed to know that name.

I felt a deflating sense of the inevitable. Thought to myself,
It’s finally happened,
as I said, “I have no idea what you mean.”

“Then let me tell you all about it. Really fascinating stuff. An international spy ring, deep cover reconnaissance, espionage, sabotage, political terrorism—and at least three successful assassinations. You probably don’t know anything about those, either.”

He was wrong about the number of assassinations. There’d been at least seven, probably more.

I said, “It sounds like one of those movies. Something they dream up in Hollywood.”

“Oh, it gets much, much better. I’ll give you all the details if you want—maybe jog your memory about a few things. Later, when I’m done, you can decide if you’re willing to do a couple of favors for me. And Lindsey, of course. She’s my main concern.”

“Is this supposed to sound like extortion? Because it does.”

“No, what it’s supposed to sound like is diplomacy. You said yourself, that’s what I do. In the real world, Doctor Ford, this is the way diplomacy works.”

Harrington told me a few things I already knew, but much I didn’t know or even suspect. He said that Sky Hook was one of many operations successfully carried out by an illegal team of intelligence operatives. The organization was the brainchild of a President who figured out how to take the law into his own hands without really breaking the law. Harrington seemed to admire that. Said that sooner or later, they all try it. But he was one of the few smart enough to get away with it, plus he had staff members loyal enough to protect him afterward.

“In his memoirs, even on his deathbed, the President never gave away the secret. To give up the secret was to sentence certain people to death. He knew that. Clearly, his Chief of Staff knew it, too, because he’s the man who administrated the operation. Same deal. Took the secret to his own deathbed. Just like the old secretary. As far as I know, except for the file here on my desk, there is absolutely no other written record of this illegal organization.”

Standing in the pale February light, feeling the breeze freshening from off the Gulf, I thought about the papers locked away in my safety-deposit box on Sanibel. Locked away in the bank just down Periwinkle Way from the Timbers Restaurant and Bailey’s General Store. Harrington was wrong. Other written records did exist. For my own protection and security, I’d kept several original documents and copies of others. Mostly orders and directives I’d received. They were never signed, of course. Ever.

I said, “I’m still listening.”

“It was in the second year of the President’s first term. He believed, and not without cause, that certain subversive groups inside and outside the country had become so powerful that there was no quick and legal way to deal with them. He thought the Republic was in real danger—and let’s face it, he was probably right. The President had also developed a mistrust that bordered on hatred for the media. Way too many leaks from some of the highest branches of government. So he did something very bold and very smart but absolutely illegal.

“The President came up with an idea. Why not create his very own team of intelligence operatives? Provide those operatives with the finest training this nation had to offer, but fund them through the private sector. That way, there would be no money trail. There was no legal obligation for him or any of his staff to make the existence of his team a matter of public record. This still doesn’t sound familiar?”

Actually, it
was
news to me. I’d never known for certain how the organization had gotten started. I said, “This is the first I’ve heard any of it.”

“Funny thing is, Doctor Ford, my diplomat’s instincts say you’re telling the truth—for once. Which maybe isn’t so surprising. The way they set it up was, they created a classic series of isolated, working cells, all on a strictly need-to-know basis. From all I’ve read in those files, I’m convinced that many if not most of the men involved never really did know who they were working for.”

The phone to my ear, still watching the fishing guides through the window, laughing, joking about something. I thought,
You’ve got that right.

Listened to Harrington say, “The President’s closest friend and adviser was one of the wealthiest men on earth. They had the same political views, the same fears.
Presto,
instant financing. The President had earned the respect and devotion of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That gave him immediate, unquestioned, and clandestine access to all military records. So those three men—all dead now—decided to go ahead with the plan on an experimental basis: Create a super-select special warfare, intelligence-gathering unit that operated at the President’s pleasure and answered only to his administrators. Here—you want me to read the unit’s covenant statement? One sentence, it defines what the team was designed to do and the methods it could use.”

I said, “It’s an interesting story so far. Go ahead.”

“Okay, this is from an unsigned White House directive: ‘This civilian organization shall be established to serve and protect the best interests of the United States of America through the use of any and all means the group’s members deem beneficial to the well-being of the nation.’ How’s that for telling the legislative and judicial branches to go to hell? ‘Any and all means necessary.’ Are you sure you’ve never heard any of this?”

Actually, there’d been a period in my life, while working in Asia, that I’d kept a coded version of that mission statement in my pocket day and night; carried it around like a good luck charm, or a declaration of absolution. “Nope, Harrington. But, like I said, it’s a good story.”

“Hal.”

“Okay, Hal.”

Harrington told me how the President and his men had set it up and made it work. Listening to him was like listening to an unexpected biographer describe unknown components that designed my life. The men who created the organization had a name for us: The Negotiators. They later changed it to Negotiating and Systems Analysis Group as a cover, but they continued to refer to us as The Negotiators in private correspondence.

They took it very, very slowly. They decided that a top priority for members of their new organization would be intelligence. Brain power was an imperative. So what they did was they reviewed results from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Tests. Then they coupled those results with IQ scores from high school or college. Because they had a service pool of several million men to choose from, they came up with a lot of good, bright prospects.

Without much trouble, though, they narrowed it down to a couple hundred candidates. The people they went after didn’t even know they were being considered. That’s when the real culling process began, according to Harrington. Men with wives were immediately eliminated. Same with men who had large or interactive families. They wanted men with few family ties. Men who could disappear for many months, or maybe forever, and not have pissed-off mothers or sisters asking embarrassing questions.

He said, “Athletic aptitude was another major consideration. The training the candidates had to go through was extremely physical. So was psychological stability. The sensitive, artistic types were dropped right away. There’s a note in this file from one of the government shrinks, a kind of protest letter. Want me to read it to you?”

I’d never heard any of this before. I’d always wondered why they’d selected me and how they’d selected me. I would have loved to come right out and ask to read through everything he’d found, but I couldn’t risk that. Instead, I told him, “I’ll listen to a little more, but it’s getting old.”

“Okay, how about I read just a couple of key sentences? The shrink wrote, ‘I feel I should point out that the candidate template you describe is a man without conscience, or at least one who has the ability to repress emotions that many believe are key to a healthy, well-adjusted human being. It’s my feeling that such individuals, depending on their training, could become extremely dangerous.’ ”

Harrington said, “See there? That’s the kind of man they wanted.” He told me that, in the same letter, the psychiatrist used the phrase ‘cold-blooded analysts’ to describe an ideal candidate, which caused the diplomat to chuckle. “Somehow, that doesn’t sound like the man who wrestled around with his conscience before taking my daughter to bed. Maybe you’ve matured, Commander Ford. Or softened up a little.”

He was enjoying this too much. I wondered why. As for me, I was tired of the implicit drama that he seemed to be prolonging. I was tired of waiting, tired of the low-grade anxiety I felt while he continued to avoid the obvious: Had he or had he not found my name in those files?

It was time to put an end to it. I said, “Why are telling me this? Are you suggesting that I was somehow a part of some kind of illegal army? Or whatever the hell you would call something like that?”

He laughed. “Haven’t you been listening? Of course I am! Are you denying it?”

“You found my name in one of those files? Because, if you did find my name, there must be—”

“Relax, Ford. That’s what you’ve been worried about the whole time. I’m sorry. I was being cruel. The obvious question: Are you mentioned by name? I think you’ll be relieved. Nope, you are not mentioned. There are no names in the file. The administrators did a superb job of protecting their people. Your code number’s in there and your code name. Lots of other bits of telltale information that helped me pick you out. But no, the name Marion W. Ford is not included, which is why I’ve never had to pass the files along to my superiors. If we don’t know who you and your teammates are, there’s no one to prosecute. And you
could
be prosecuted—there’s no statue of limitations on murder, as I’m sure you know.”