The Marching Season (24 page)

She was supposed to be a mere caretaker, someone to keep the chair in the DCI’s office warm for a couple of years, until Beckwith’s successor could appoint his intelligence chief. But she was incapable of playing the role of caretaker and set out on a mission to make herself indispensable to whoever sat in the Oval Office after Beckwith, Republican or Democrat.

She believed she was the only person at Langley with the vision to lead the Agency through the uncertain terrain of the post-Cold War period. She had studied the history of intelligence well. She knew that sometimes it was necessary to sacrifice a few in order to ensure the survival of the many. She felt a kinship with the deception officers of World War II who sent men and women to their death in order to deceive Nazi Germany. She would never permit the Agency to be castrated. She would never allow the United States to be without an adequate intelligence service. And she would do anything to make certain
she
was the one who was running it. Which is why she had joined the Society and why she abided by its code.

At 1 A.M. she picked up the receiver on the secure telephone and dialed. A few seconds later she heard the pleasant, cultured voice of the Director’s assistant, Daphne. Then the Director came on the line.

“You no longer need to worry about Osbourne,” she said.

“He’s been reassigned, and the October case file has been effectively closed. As far as the CIA is concerned, October is dead and buried.”

“Well done,” the Director said.

“Where’s the package now?”

“Bound for the Caribbean,” he said. “It should be arriving in the States sometime in the next thirty-six to forty-eight hours. And then it will be all over.”

“Excellent,” she said.

“I trust you will pass along any information that might help the package arrive at its destination on time.”

“Of course, Director.”

“I knew I could count on you. Good morning, Picasso,” the Director said, and the line went dead.

CHAPTER 35

CHESAPEAKE BAY, MARYLAND

The Boston Whaler bounced over the choppy waters of the Chesapeake. The night was clear and bitterly cold; a bright three-quarter moon floated high above the eastern horizon. Delaroche had doused the running lights shortly after entering the mouth of the bay. He reached forward and pressed a button on the dash-mounted navigation unit. The GPS system automatically calculated his precise longitude and latitude; they were in the center of the busy shipping lanes of the Chesapeake Channel.

Rebecca Wells stood next to him, clutching the wheel of the Whaler’s second console. Without speaking, she pointed over the prow. Ahead of them, perhaps a mile away, shone the lights of a container vessel. Delaroche turned a few degrees to port and sped toward the shallow waters of the western shore.

Delaroche had meticulously plotted his course up the Chesapeake during the long ride from Nassau to the East Coast. They had made that leg of the journey aboard a large oceangoing yacht, piloted by a pair of former SAS men from the Society. He and Rebecca stayed in adjoining staterooms. By day they studied NOAA charts of the Chesapeake, reviewed the dossiers of Michael Osbourne and Douglas Cannon, and memorized the streets of Washington. At night they went onto the aft deck and took target practice with Delaroche’s Berettas. Rebecca pressed him for his name, but each time she asked, Delaroche simply shook his head and changed the subject. Out of frustration she christened him “Pierre,” which Delaroche detested. On the last night aboard the yacht, he admitted that he had no real name, but if she felt it necessary to refer to him by something, he should be called Jean-Paul.

Delaroche still was furious about being forced to work with the woman, but the Director had been right about one thing: She was no amateur. The conflict in Northern Ireland had sharpened her skills to a fine edge. She had a superb memory and sound operational instincts. She was tall and quite strong for a woman, and after three nights of training with the Beretta, she was a more than adequate shot. Delaroche was concerned with only one thing—her idealism. He believed in nothing but his art. Zealots unnerved him. Astrid Vogel had been a believer like Rebecca once—when she was a member of West Germany’s communist terrorist group, the Red Army Faction—but by the time she and Delaroche worked together she had been stripped of her ideals and was in it only for the money.

Delaroche had memorized every detail of the Chesapeake—the shoals, the rivers and bays, the flats and the headlands. All he required was a reading from his GPS unit to know exactly where he was in relation to land. He had passed Sandy Point, Cherry Point, and Windmill Point. By the time he reached Bluff Point he had grown stiff and sore with the cold. He cut the engines, and they drank hot coffee from a thermos flask.

He checked the GPS navigation unit: 38.50 degrees latitude by 76.31 degrees longitude. He knew he was approaching Curtis Point, a headland at the mouth of the West River. His destination was the next tidal river feeding into the bay from Maryland, the South River, roughly three nautical miles to the north. As he passed Saunders Point he saw the first light in the east, off the starboard side of the Whaler. He rounded Turkey Point and felt the gentle nudge of the tide running out of the South River.

Delaroche opened the throttle as he headed northeast up the river. He wanted to be ashore and on the road before dawn. He sped past Mayo Point and Brewer Point, Glebe Bay and Crab Creek. He passed beneath one bridge, then another. He came to a creek mouth and checked his navigation unit to make certain it was Broad Creek. The receding tide had left the creek shallower than the charts had promised; twice Delaroche jumped into the frigid water and pushed the Whaler off the bottom.

Finally, he reached the head of the creek. He grounded the Whaler in a patch of marsh grass, hopped overboard, and, pulling on the bowline, dragged the boat deep into the marsh.

Rebecca clambered into the forward seating compartment and took hold of a large duffel filled with supplies: clothing, money, and electronic equipment. She handed the bag to Delaroche, then stepped over the side into the sodden marsh. The car was parked on a dirt track, exactly where the Director had said it would be: a black Volvo station wagon, Quebec license plates.

Delaroche had a key. He opened the trunk and tossed in the bag. He followed a series of two-lane country roads for several miles, through farmland and sunlit pastures, until he came to Route 50. He turned onto the highway and headed east toward Washington.

One hour after collecting the Volvo, they entered Washington on New York Avenue, a grimy commuter corridor stretching from the Northeast section of the city to the Maryland suburbs. Delaroche had stopped once at a roadside gas station so he and Rebecca could change into proper clothing. He crossed the city on Massachusetts Avenue and pulled into the drive of the Embassy Row hotel near Dupont Circle. There was a reservation waiting in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Claude Duras of Montreal.

The demands of their cover story required Delaroche and Rebecca to share a single room. They slept until the late afternoon, Rebecca in the queen-size bed, Delaroche on the floor, with the bedspread as a mattress. He awoke suddenly at 4 P.M., startled by the surroundings, and realized he had been dreaming again of Maurice Leroux.

He ordered coffee sent to the room, which he drank while he placed several items into a blue nylon backpack: two pieces of sophisticated electronic equipment, two cellular telephones, a flashlight, several small tools, and a Beretta 9-millimeter. Rebecca emerged from the bathroom, dressed in blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words
WASHINGTON, D.C.
and an image of the White House.

“How do I look?” she asked.

“Your hair is too blond.” Delaroche reached in the duffel bag and tossed her a ball cap. “Put this on.”

Delaroche telephoned downstairs and asked the valet to have the Volvo waiting. He drove west along P Street. There was a tourist map on the dashboard that Delaroche did not bother to open; the streets of Washington, like the waters of the Chesapeake, were engraved in his memory.

He crossed into Georgetown and drove along the quiet tree-lined streets. It was considered the most glamorous neighborhood in Washington, with redbrick sidewalks and large Federal-style homes, but to Delaroche, whose eye was used to the canals and gabled houses of Amsterdam, it all seemed rather prosaic.

He drove west on P Street until he reached Wisconsin Avenue. He headed south on Wisconsin, accompanied by the pounding beat of rap music vibrating from the gold BMW behind him. He turned onto N Street, and the madness of Wisconsin Avenue slowly dissipated behind them.

The house was empty, just as Delaroche knew it would be. Ambassador Cannon was arriving from London the following afternoon. He was hosting a private dinner party for friends and family that evening. The next day he would take part in the conference on Northern Ireland at the White House, then attend a series of receptions in the evening hosted by the parties to the talks. It was all in the Director’s dossier.

Delaroche parked around the corner from the house, on Thirty-third Street. He placed a camera around his neck and strolled the quiet block, Rebecca on his arm, pausing now and again to gaze at the large brick townhouses with light spilling from their windows. It was rather like Amsterdam, he thought, the way people kept their curtains open and allowed passersby to gaze into their homes and assess their possessions.

He had been there before; he knew the challenges that N Street posed to a man like him. There were no cafes in which to dawdle over coffee, no shops for diversionary purchases, no squares or parks to kill time without attracting attention-—

just large expensive homes, with nosy neighbors and security systems.

They walked past the Osbournes’ house. A black sedan was parked across the street. Seated behind the wheel was a man in a tan raincoat, reading the sports section of
The Washington Post.
So much for the Director’s theory that Ambassador Cannon would be easy to kill while he was in Washington, Delaroche thought. The man hadn’t even set foot in town yet, and already the house was under watch.

Delaroche paused a block away and made photographs of the home where John Kennedy had lived when he was a senator from Massachusetts. A number of Cabinet secretaries lived in Georgetown; their homes were under constant surveillance. If the official was involved in national security, such as the secretary of state or the defense secretary, their bodyguards might even have a static post in a nearby apartment. But Delaroche felt confident that Douglas Cannon’s security consisted entirely of the man in the tan raincoat—at least for now.

He led Rebecca south on Thirty-first Street for a half block, until they reached an alley that ran behind the Osbournes’ house. He peered into the half darkness; just as he suspected, it looked as if the back of the house was not under watch.

Delaroche handed Rebecca a cellular telephone. “Stay here. Call me if there’s trouble. If I’m not back in five minutes, leave and go back to the hotel. If you don’t hear from me within a half hour, contact the Director and request an extraction.”

Rebecca nodded. Delaroche turned and set out down the alley. He paused behind the Osbournes’ house, then deftly scaled the fence and dropped into a well-tended garden surrounding a small swimming pool. He looked overhead and followed the lines leading from the telephone pole in the alley to the point where they attached to the house. He crossed the garden and knelt in front of the telephone switch box at the back of the house. He unzipped the backpack and removed his tools and a flashlight. Holding the flashlight between his teeth, he loosened the screws holding the cover of the switch box in place and studied the configuration of the lines for a moment.

There were two lines leading into the house, but Delaroche only had the equipment to tap one of them. He suspected one line was probably reserved for telephone calls, the other for a fax machine or modem. He reached inside the backpack again and withdrew a small electronic device. Attached to the Osbournes’ telephone line, it would relay a high-frequency radio signal to Delaroche’s cellular phone, allowing him to monitor the Osbournes’ telephone calls. It took Delaroche only two minutes to install the device on the Osbournes’ primary line and reattach the cover of the switch box.

The second device would be much easier to install, since it required only a window. It was a bugging mechanism that, when attached to the exterior of a window, would detect the vibration of sound waves inside a structure and convert them back into audio. Delaroche attached the sensor pad to the lower portion of a window off the main living room. It was concealed by a shrub outside and an end table inside. He buried the converter and transmitter unit in a patch of mulch in the garden.

Delaroche retraced his steps across the lawn. He tossed the backpack over the fence, then scaled it and dropped down into the alley. The two units he had just placed on the Osbournes’ house had an effective range of two miles, which would allow him to monitor the Osbournes from the security of their hotel room at Dupont Circle.

Rebecca was waiting for him at the end of the alley.

“Let’s go,” he said.

He took her by the hand and walked back to the Volvo.

Delaroche sat in front of a receiver the size of a shoe box, testing the signal of the transmitter he had placed on the Osbournes’ window. Rebecca was in the bathroom. He could hear the sound of water running into the basin. She had been there for more than an hour. Finally, the water stopped running and she came out, wearing a hotel bathrobe, her hair wrapped in a white towel like a sheikh. She lit one of his cigarettes and said, “Does it work?”

“The transmitter is sending out a signal, but I won’t be certain until there’s someone in the house.”

“I’m hungry,” she said.

“Order some food from room service.”

“I want to go out.”

“It’s better if we stay inside.”

“I’ve been trapped on boats for ten days. I want to go out.”

“Get dressed, and I’ll take you out.”

“Close your eyes,” she said, but Delaroche stood and turned to face her. He reached out and tugged at the towel around her head. Her hair was no longer an abrasive shade of blond; it was nearly black and shimmering with dampness. Suddenly, it was in sync with the rest of her features—her gray eyes, her luminous white skin, her oval face. He realized that she was a remarkably beautiful woman. Then he became angry; he wished he could hide in a bathroom with a bottle of elixir and emerge an hour later with his old face.

She seemed to read his thoughts.

“You have scars,” she said, tracing a finger along the bottom of his jawline. “What happened?”

“If you stay in this business too long a face can become a liability.”

Her finger had moved from his jawline to his cheekbone, and she was toying with the collagen implants just beneath the skin. “What did you look like before?” she asked.

Delaroche raised his eyebrows and pondered her question for an instant. He thought, How would anyone describe his own appearance? If he said he had been beautiful once, before Maurice Leroux destroyed his face, she might think he was a liar. He sat down at the desk and removed a piece of hotel stationery and a pencil.

“Go away for a few minutes,” he said.

She went into the bathroom again, closed the door, and switched on the hair drier. He worked quickly, the pencil scratching over the paper. When he finished, he appraised his own features rather dispassionately, as if they belonged to a creature of his imagination.

He slipped the self-portrait beneath the bathroom door. The hair drier stopped whining. Rebecca came out, holding Delaroche’s old face in her hands. She looked at him, then at the image on the paper. She kissed the portrait and dropped it onto the floor. Then she kissed Delaroche.

“Who was she, Jean-Paul?”

“Who?”

“The woman you were thinking about while you were making love to me.”