The Mark of the Assassin (8 page)
Someone must have told him to spruce up his wardrobe for headquarters, because he was always immaculately turned out in costly English and Italian suits. Fine clothing did not hang naturally on Carter’s short, slouching frame; a thousand-dollar Armani ended up looking like a cheap knockoff from one of the suspect boutiques along Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. Michael always thought he looked slightly ridiculous, like a clerk in an exclusive men’s shop who wore suits he could not afford. But Carter was an obsessive who never did anything halfway—his tradecraft, his wife and family, his jazz. His newest passion was golf, and he restlessly practiced his stroke with plastic golf balls in his small glass-enclosed office. Once Michael slipped a real ball among the replicas. Carter promptly launched it through his office window during a conference call with Monica Tyler and the Director. The following day Carter received a bill for the repairs and a reprimand from Personnel.
“She drives me nuts sometimes,” Carter muttered softly. He had served as Michael’s control officer when Michael was working without official cover and couldn’t come to embassies. Even now, walking toward the west parking lot of headquarters, they moved as though they were conducting a debriefing under hostile surveillance. “She thinks gathering intelligence is as easy as putting together a quarterly earnings report.”
“She has the Director’s complete trust and therefore should be handled carefully.”
“Listen to you—the headquarters man all of a sudden.”
Michael tossed his cigarette into the dark. “There’s something about this attack that stinks.”
“More than the fact that two hundred and fifty people are lying on the bottom of the Atlantic?”
“That body in the boat makes no sense.”
“None of it makes sense.”
“And there’s something else.”
“Oh, Christ. I’ve been waiting for this.”
“The way Mahmoud was shot in the face like that.”
They stopped walking. Carter turned and looked up at Osbourne. “Michael, let me give you a piece of advice. Now is not the time to go chasing after your Jackal again.”
They walked in silence until they reached Michael’s car.
“Why is it that you drive a silver Jaguar and live in Georgetown and I drive an Accord and live in Reston?”
“Because I have better cover than you do, and I’m married to a rich lawyer.”
“You’re the luckiest man I know, Osbourne. If I were you I wouldn’t fuck it up.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means what’s done is done. Go home and get some sleep.”
Michael’s father ended up hating the Agency, but somewhere along the line, whether it was his intention or not, he created in his son the makings of a perfect intelligence officer. Michael came to the attention of the Agency during his junior year at Dartmouth. The talent spotter was a professor of American literature who had worked for the Agency in Berlin after the Second World War. He saw in the ragged, bearded college student the makings of a perfect field officer—intelligence, leadership skills, charisma, attitude, and the ability to speak several languages.
What the professor did not know was that Michael’s father had worked in the clandestine service and that Michael and his mother had followed him from posting to posting. He could speak five languages by the time he was sixteen. When the Agency came for him the first time, he turned them down. He had seen what the job had done to his father, and he had seen the toll it had taken on his mother.
But the Agency wanted him, and it kept trying. He finally agreed after graduation, because he had no job prospects and no better ideas. He was sent to Camp Perry, the CIA training facility outside Williamsburg, Virginia, known as the Farm. There he learned how to recruit and run agents. He learned the art of clandestine communication. He learned how to spot enemy surveillance. He learned the martial arts and defensive driving.
After a year of training he was supplied with a cover identity and an Agency pseudonym and given a simple assignment: Penetrate the world’s most violent terror organizations.
Michael drove along Route 123, turned onto the George Washington Parkway, and headed toward the city. The road was deserted. The tall trees on either side twisted in the gusty wind, and a bright moon shone through broken clouds. Reflexively, he checked his mirror several times to make certain he was not being followed. He pressed the accelerator; the speedometer showed seventy. The Jaguar rose and fell over the gentle landscape. The trees opened to his left, and the Potomac sparkled in the moonlight. After a few minutes the spires of Georgetown appeared. He took the Key Bridge exit and crossed the river into Washington.
M Street was deserted, just a few homeless men drinking in Key Park and a knot of Georgetown students talking on the sidewalk outside the local Kinko’s. He turned left on 33rd Street. The bright lights and shops of M Street vanished behind him. The house had a private parking space in the back, reached by a narrow alley, but Michael preferred to leave his car on the street in plain view. He turned left onto N Street and found a spot; then, as was his habit, he watched the front of the house for a moment before shutting down the motor. Michael enjoyed being a case officer—the seduction of a good recruitment, the payoff of a timely piece of intelligence—but this was the part of the job he didn’t like, the gnawing anxiety he felt every time he entered his own home, the fear his enemies would finally take their revenge.
Michael had always lived with an element of personal risk because of the way he did his job. In the lexicon of the CIA, he was a NOC, the Agency acronym for non-official cover. It meant that instead of working out of an embassy, with a State Department cover, like most operations officers, Michael was on his own. He had been a business major at Dartmouth, and his cover usually involved international consulting or sales. Michael preferred it that way. Most of the CIA officers operating from an embassy were known to the other side. That made conducting the business of espionage all the more difficult, especially when the target was a terrorist organization. Michael didn’t have the albatross of the embassy hanging around his neck, but he also didn’t have it for protection. If an officer operating under official cover got into trouble, he could always run to the embassy and claim diplomatic immunity. If Michael got into trouble—if a recruitment went bad or the opposing service learned the true nature of his work—he could be thrown in jail or worse. The anxiety had receded gently after so many years at headquarters, but it never really left him. His overwhelming fear was that his enemies would go after the thing he cared about most. They had done it before.
He climbed out of the car, locked it, and set the alarm. He walked west to 34th Street, examining the cars, checking the tags. At 34th he crossed the street and did the same on the other side.
Curved brick steps rose from the sidewalk to the front door of their wide Federal-style house. Michael used to be sensitive about living in a two-million-dollar Georgetown home; most of his colleagues lived in the less-expensive Virginia suburbs around Langley. They kidded him relentlessly about his lavish home and his car, wondering aloud whether Michael had gone the way of Rick Ames and was selling secrets for money. The truth was far less interesting: Elizabeth earned $500,000 a year at Braxton, Allworth & Kettlemen, and Michael had inherited a million dollars when his mother died.
He unlocked the front door, first the latch, then the deadbolt. The alarm chirped quietly as he stepped inside. He closed the door softly, locked it again, and disarmed the alarm system. Upstairs, he could hear Elizabeth stir in bed. He left his briefcase on the island counter in the kitchen, took a beer from the refrigerator, and drank half of it in the first swallow. The air smelled faintly of cigarettes. Elizabeth had been smoking, a bad sign. She had given up cigarettes ten years ago, but she smoked when she was angry or nervous. The appointment at Georgetown must not have gone well. Michael felt like a complete ass for missing it. He had a convenient excuse—his work, the downing of the jetliner—but Elizabeth had an all-consuming job too, and she had changed her schedule in order to see the doctor.
He looked around at the kitchen; it was bigger than his entire first apartment. He thought back to the afternoon five years ago when they signed the papers on the house. He remembered walking through the large empty rooms, Elizabeth talking excitedly about what would go where, how the rooms would be decorated, what color they would be painted. She wanted children, lots of children, running around the house, making noise, breaking things. Michael wanted them too. He had lived an enchanted childhood, growing up in exotic places all over the world, but he’d had no siblings and he felt there was something missing in his life. Their inability to have children had taken a toll. Sometimes the place seemed empty and cheerless, far too large for just the two of them, more like a museum than a home. Sometimes he felt as though children had been there once but had been taken away. He felt they had been sentenced to live there together, just the two of them, wounded, forever.
He shut out the lights and carried the rest of the beer upstairs to the bedroom. Elizabeth was sitting up in bed, knees beneath her chin, arms wrapped around her legs. An overhead light burned softly high in the cathedral ceiling. Dying embers glowed in the fireplace. Her short blond hair was tousled; her eyes betrayed she had not slept. Her gaze was somewhere else. Three half-smoked cigarettes lay in the ashtray on her nightstand. A pile of briefs was strewn across his side of the bed. He could tell she was angry, and she had dealt with it the way she always did—throwing herself into her work. Michael undressed silently.
“What time is it?” she asked, without looking at him.
“Late.”
“Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you tell me you were going to be so late tonight?”
“There were developments in the case. I thought you’d be asleep.”
“I don’t care if you wake me up, Michael. I needed to hear your voice.”
“I’m sorry, Elizabeth. The place was crashing. I couldn’t get away.”
“Why didn’t you come to the appointment?”
Michael was unbuttoning his shirt. He stopped and turned to look at her. Her face was red, her eyes damp.
“Elizabeth, I’m the officer assigned to the terrorist group that may have shot down that jetliner. I can’t walk out in the middle of the day and come to Washington for a doctor’s appointment.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t, that’s why. The President of the United States is making decisions based on what
we
tell him, and in a situation like this it’s impossible for me to leave the office, even for a couple of hours.”
we
tell him, and in a situation like this it’s impossible for me to leave the office, even for a couple of hours.”
“Michael, I have a job too. It may not be as important as working for the CIA, but it is damned important to me. I’m juggling three cases right now, I’ve got Braxton breathing down my neck, and I’m trying desperately to have a—”
Her composure cracked, just for an instant.
“I’m sorry, Elizabeth. I wanted to come, but I couldn’t. Not on a day like today. I felt horrible about missing the appointment. What did the doctor say?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. Michael crossed the room, sat down beside her on the bed, and pulled her close. She put her head against his shoulder and cried softly.
“He’s not sure what the problem is exactly. I can’t get pregnant. Something might be wrong with my tubes. He’s not certain. He wants to try one more thing: IVF. He says Cornell in New York is the best. They can take us next month.”
Elizabeth looked up at him, her face wet with tears.
“I don’t want to get my hopes up, Michael, but I’ll never forgive myself if we don’t try everything.”
“I agree.”
“It means spending some time in New York. I’ll make arrangements to work out of our Manhattan office. Dad will stay on the island so we can use the apartment.”
“I’ll talk to Carter about working from the New York Station. I may have to go back and forth a few times, but I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”
“Thank you, Michael. I’m sorry about snapping at you. I was just so damned angry.”
“Don’t apologize. It was my fault.”
“I knew what I was getting into when I married you. I know I can’t change what you do. But sometimes I need you to be around more. I need more time with you. I feel like we bump into each other in the morning and bump into each other again at night.”
“We could quit our jobs.”
“We can’t quit our jobs.” She kissed his mouth. “Get undressed and come to bed. It’s late.”
Michael rose and walked into the large master bath. He finished undressing, brushed his teeth, and washed his face without looking in the mirror. The bedroom was dark when he returned, but Elizabeth was still sitting up in bed, her arms wrapped around her knees again.
“I see it in your face, you know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That look.”
“What look?”
“That look you get on your face every time someone gets killed anywhere in the world.”
Michael lay down on the bed and rolled onto his elbow to face her.
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