The Ambler Warning Page 4

  “Well, there’s this yellow interoffice thing from the deputy director’s office.”

  “You should know the agency color codes by now. There’s no ‘yellow’ at the CIA.”

  “Sorry,” Adrian said. “Canary.”

  “Which signifies what?”

  “It’s for . . .” He paused, his mind temporarily a blank. “It’s for a stateside incident with security implications. Ergo non-CIA. Something to do with the other services. OGAs.” OGAs: other governmental agencies. A convenient “wastebasket” term.

  Caston nodded briskly and accepted the bright yellow envelope. It was distasteful to him, like a garish, shrieking tropical bird: a canary, in fact. He broke the security seal himself, put on his reading glasses, and quickly scanned the report. Potential security breach related to an inmate escape. A Patient No. 5312, resident at a high-security clandestine treatment center.

  It was strange, Caston reflected, that the inpatient wasn’t named. He reread the report to see where the incident had taken place.

  The Parrish Island Psychiatric Facility.

  It rang a bell. A warning bell.

  Ambler pushed through the half-dormant coastal vegetation—yards of saltbush, switch grass, and bayberry, the sandpapery blades and thorny scrub scratching at his sodden clothing—and then through a stand of leafless, salt-stunted trees. He shivered as the cold wind gusted again, and tried to ignore the gritty sand that had spilled into his ill-fitting shoes, abrading his skin with every step. Given that the Langley Air Force Base was probably twenty or thirty miles to his north and the U.S. Naval Base about the same distance to his south, he expected, any moment now, to hear the low whomp-whomp-whomp of a military helicopter. Highway 64 was within half a mile of where he was. There was no time to rest. The longer Ambler was a lone man in the open, the greater the danger he was in.

  He quickened his pace until he heard the thrumming of the highway. On the wide shoulder, he brushed off sand and leaves, put up a thumb, and smiled. He was wet and bedraggled and wearing a strange uniform. The smile would have to be pretty damned reassuring.

  A minute later, a truck decorated with a Frito-Lay logo pulled over. The driver, a pug-featured man with an immense stomach and knockoff Ray·Bans, waved him in. Ambler had his ride.

  The words of an old hymn came to him: We have come this far by faith.

  A truck, a car, a bus: a few transfers later, he was in the asphalt penumbra of the capital. In a strip mall, he found a sporting goods store, where he hurriedly bought a few nondescript garments from the bulk bins, paying with cash that was in the pockets of his uniform and changing into the clothes behind a hedge of boxwood that adjoined the store. He hadn’t had time even to glance at himself in a mirror, but he knew his current garb—the khakis, flannel shirt, zippered windbreaker—was close to the default wardrobe of the American male outside the office.

  A five-minute wait at the bus stop: Rip Van Winkle was coming home.

  Watching the landscape grow denser as the bus moved closer to Washington proper, Ambler found himself in a contemplative mood. There was always a point when the body’s system of stress hormones depleted itself, and excitement, or fear, gave way to numbness. Ambler had reached that point now. His mind wandered. Faces and voices from the place he’d left swirled through his consciousness.

  He had left his captors behind, but not his memories of them.

  The last psychiatrist who had “evaluated” him had been a lean, tightly wound man in his early fifties with black-framed glasses. His hair was graying at the temples, and a long brown forelock fell across his forehead in a boyish manner that only emphasized how far from boyish he really was. But when Ambler looked at him, he saw other things, too.

  He saw a man who, fidgeting protectively with his carefully tabbed folders and felt-tip pens (ballpoints, like pencils, were viewed as potential weapons), resented his job and his surroundings—resented the fact that he worked in a government facility where secrecy, not treatment, was the paramount concern. How had he ended up here? Ambler could readily conjecture: a career trajectory that began with a ROTC scholarship to college and med school, and a psychiatric residency at a military hospital. But it wasn’t supposed to end up like this, was it? Alert to a thousand different expressions of wounded wariness, Ambler saw a man who had dreams of a different sort of life, perhaps the kind of life that used to figure in old novels and movies: a book-lined office on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a tufted leather couch and wing chair, a pipe, a clientele of writers, artists, and musicians, fascinating challenges. Now the hardest part was simply getting through his rounds at a place he despised, among patients and staff members he mistrusted. Frustrated, he would have looked for something else to make him feel alive, special, not just another government drone at an E9 pay grade. Maybe he was a world traveler, husbanding his vacation days and going off on special package ecotours through rain forests and deserts. Maybe he had put together a remarkable wine cellar or was a handball fanatic, an obsessive golfer—something. It was always something with these burned-out cases. Every particular detail in Ambler’s speculations might be wrong. Yet he was sure that he had the basic structure of sentiment right. He knew people: it was what he did.

  It was what he saw.

  The psychiatrist disliked him—was made uneasy by Ambler on a hindbrain level. The man’s expertise was supposed to give him special insight into his patient, and with that, usually, went a sense of power, of authority: the authority of the teacher over the pupil, the physician over the patient. But this man did not experience that sense of authority around Ambler.

  “Let me remind you that the purpose of these sessions is strictly evaluative,” the man told his patient. “My job is to monitor progress, and keep an eye on any untoward side effects of the medications. So let’s start with that. Any new side effects I should be aware of?”

  “It would be easier to talk about side effects,” Ambler said ponderously, “if I knew what the main effect was supposed to be.”

  “The meds are meant to control your psychiatric symptoms, as you know. Paranoid ideation, dissociative disorder, ego-dystonic syndromes . . .”

  “Words,” Ambler said. “Without meaning. Sounds without sense.”

  The psychiatrist typed a few notes on his laptop computer. His pale gray eyes were chilly behind his glasses.

  “Several different psychiatric teams have wrestled with your dissociative identity disorders. We’ve been through this.” The doctor pressed a button on a small remote control, and an audiotape played, the sound emerging bright and clear through recessed speakers. A voice—Ambler’s voice—was audible, spewing conspiracy theories with an unhinged sense of urgency: “You’re behind it. All of you. And all of them. The trail of the human serpent is over all.” On and on the recording went. “The Trilateral Commission . . . Opus Dei . . . the Rockefellers . . .”

  To Ambler, the sound of himself, recorded from a previous psychiatric session, was almost physically painful.

  “Stop it,” he said quietly, unable to tamp down an upwelling of emotion. “Please stop it.”

  The psychiatrist paused the tape. “Do you still believe those . . . theories?”

  “They’re paranoid fantasies,” Ambler said, groggily but distinctly. “And the answer is no. I don’t even have a memory of having held them.”

  “You deny that’s you on the tape?”

  “No,” Ambler said. “I don’t deny it. I just don’t . . . remember it. That’s not me, OK? I mean, that’s not who I am.”

  “You’re somebody else, then. Two different people. Or more?”

  Ambler shrugged helplessly. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a fireman. I don’t want to be a fireman anymore. That kid isn’t who I am.”

  “Last week you said that when you were a kid, you wanted to be a ballplayer when you grew up. Or was I speaking to someone else entirely?” The psychiatrist took his glasses off. “The question I’m putting to you is the question you need to put to you
rself: Who are you?”

  “The problem with the question,” Ambler said after a long pause, “is that you think it’s multiple-choice. You want me to choose from your little list of options.”

  “Is that the problem?” The psychiatrist looked up from his laptop. “I’d say the real problem is that you’re checking off more than one answer.”

  It took Ambler a few moments to rouse himself when the bus came to the Cleveland Park stop, but he made it out in time. On the street, Ambler put on his cap and looked all around him—first alert to any departure from normality and then full-heartedly appreciative of normality itself.

  He was back.

  He wanted to leap into the air. He wanted to throw his arms up. He wanted to track down those responsible for his confinement and serve brutal justice to them: Did you think I wouldn’t get out? Is that what you thought?

  This was not the weather he would have chosen for a homecoming. The skies were still dark; drizzle kept the pavements slick and black. It was an ordinary day in an ordinary place, he realized, but after his long period of isolation, he was overwhelmed by the frenetic activity he saw everywhere around him.

  He walked past lampposts of octagonal concrete, trussed with metal bands that held in place photocopied bills and posters. Poetry readings in coffeehouses. Concerts given by rock bands only recently graduated from garages. A new vegetarian restaurant. A comedy club with the unfortunate name Miles of Smiles. All the blooming, buzzing confusion of human activity, clamoring for attention on sodden pieces of paper. Life on the outside. No—he corrected himself—just life.

  He craned his head, hyperalert. An ordinary street on a dismal day. There were dangers, yes. But if he could reach his apartment, he could retrieve the ordinary detritus of his existence; indeed, its very ordinariness was what made it so precious to him. The ordinary was what he craved; the ordinary was what he needed.

  Would they really dare to come after him here? Here—one of the few places on earth where there were people who actually knew him. Surely it was the safest place of all. Even if they appeared, he had no fear of a public confrontation. Recklessly, he almost craved one. No, he would not fear those who had interned him; it was time for them to fear him. Evidently, a rogue element had abused the system, attempting to bury him alive, submerging him among lost souls, spies gone torpid with depression or frenzied with delusion. Now that he was out, his enemies should be on the run, going to ground. The one thing they could not afford was to confront him here, in the open, where the local police would inevitably get involved. For the more people who found out about him, the greater the threat to them of exposure.

  At the corner of Connecticut Avenue and Ordway Street, Ambler saw the newsstand he used to pass every morning when he was in town. He saw the grizzled gap-toothed man behind the counter, still wearing his red knit wool cap, and smiled.

  “Reggie,” Ambler called out. “Reggie, my main man.”

  “Hey,” the counterman said. But it was a reflex, not a greeting.

  Ambler strode over to him. “Been a long time, right?”

  The counterman looked at him again. There was not a flicker of recognition in his face.

  Ambler glanced down at a stack of Washington Posts, the top copy dappled with rain, and, noticing the date, felt a pang. The third week of January—no wonder it was so cold. He blinked hard. Nearly two years. Nearly two years had been taken from him. Two years of oblivion and despair and anomie.

  But now was not the time to dwell on loss.

  “Come on, Reggie. How you been? Working hard, or hardly working?”

  On Reggie’s creased visage, puzzlement was hardening into suspicion. “I ain’t got no change for you, bro. And I don’t give out no free coffee, neither.”

  “Reggie, come on—you know me.”

  “Move along, big guy,” Reggie said. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  Ambler turned away, wordless, and walked the half block to the large Gothic Revival apartment block where he had been a tenant for the past decade, Baskerton Towers. Built in the 1920s, it was a six-story structure of red brick, adorned with light gray half-columns and pilasters of concrete. In the windows that let onto the hallways on each floor, the venetian blinds were lowered partway, like drooping eyelids.

  Baskerton Towers. A sort-of home for a man who really had none. To spend a career in a special-access program—the highest tier of operational security—was to spend a career under an alias. No division of Consular Operations was more secret than the Political Stabilization Unit, and none of its operatives ever knew one another except by a field name. It was not a way of life that lent itself to deep civilian ties: the job meant that most of your days were spent abroad, essentially unreachable, and for unpredictable stretches of time. Did he have any real friends? Still, the paltriness of his domestic existence had given special weight to his casual street acquaintances here. And for as little time as he spent in Baskerton Towers, the apartment was an authentic abode for him. It was not the sanctuary of his lake house, but it was a badge of normality. A place to drop anchor.

  The apartment block was set in from the street, a shallow, oval drive permitting cars to come up to the lobby. Ambler looked around the streets and sidewalks, saw no sign of anybody taking a particular interest in him, and walked up to the building. Someone there would know him—one of the doormen, if not the building manager or superintendent—and would let him into his apartment.

  He looked at the long tenant plaque, black plastic letters on a white board, rows of names in alphabetical order.

  No Ambler. Alston was followed by Ayer.

  Had they taken his apartment, then? It was a disappointment but something less than a surprise. “Can I help you, sir?” It was one of the doormen, emerging from the heated vestibule: Greg Denovich. His strong jaw was, as always, shadowed by a heavy, razor-resistant beard.

  “Greg,” Ambler said jovially. Greg was presumably for Gregor, he’d always assumed; the man was from the former Yugoslavia. “Been a real long time, huh?”

  The expression on Denovich’s face was becoming familiar to Ambler: it was the puzzlement of someone who has been greeted as a friend by a complete stranger.

  Ambler removed his cap and smiled. “Take your time, now, Greg. Apartment 3C?”

  “Do I know you?” Denovich asked. But it wasn’t a question this time, either. It was a statement. A statement in the negative.

  “I guess not,” Ambler said softly. And then his perplexity gave way to panic.

  From behind him, he heard the sound of tires braked hard on a rain-slick street. Ambler turned around quickly and saw a white van stopping too fast across the street. He heard doors opening and slamming shut and saw three men emerge, in the uniform of the facility’s guards. One was carrying a carbine; the other two had drawn pistols. All three were running toward him.

  The van. He recognized everything about it. It was part of an emergency “retrieval service” used by clandestine branches of the federal government for sensitive domestic “pickups.” Whether involving rogue agents or foreign operatives on U.S. soil, such parcels had in common that they were not destined for any branch of the official justice system. And on this wet and cold January morning, Harrison Ambler was the parcel to be picked up. No explanations would need to be offered to the local police, because he would have vanished long before their arrival. This was no open confrontation; what they had orchestrated was a swift, unnoticed abduction.

  In showing up here in the first place, Ambler realized, he had permitted wishful thinking to swamp his better judgment. He could afford no more mistakes.

  Think—he had to think.

  Or rather, he had to feel.

  After two decades as a field operative, Ambler had been forced to master the requisites of escape and evasion. It was second nature to him. But he never approached it through grids of logic, “decision trees,” and the other arid devices that trainers sometimes foisted upon the tyros. The challenge was to feel your way out
of situations, improvising as seemed necessary. To do otherwise was to fall into a rut of routine, and anything that was routinized could be anticipated and countered by adversaries.

  Ambler scanned the street in front of the Baskerton building. A three-point blockage would have been standard procedure: at either end of the block, a unit would have been in place before the van had pulled up opposite. Indeed, Ambler could see armed men, some uniformed, some not, moving toward the building from both directions with the purposeful stride of experienced retrieval agents. Now what? He could bolt into the lobby of the building and search out a rear exit. But the move would have been anticipated, precautions taken against it. He could wait for a passing crowd of pedestrians, join them, then try to outrace the men stationed at the far end of the block. There were dangers to that tack as well. Stop thinking, Ambler told himself. It was the only way to outsmart them.

  Staring at the man with the short-barreled rifle who was hastening across the boulevard, Ambler willed himself to see all that he could of his face, even as the drizzle turned to showers. And then he decided to do the most dangerous thing of all.

  He ran directly toward the man. “What took you so long?” Ambler bellowed at him. “Haul ass, goddammit! He’s getting away!” He swiveled around and gestured vigorously with his thumb toward the lobby of the Baskerton Towers.

  “We got here as soon as we could,” the man with the carbine replied. The other two, Ambler could see now, as they hurried past him, carried tactical .45s, twelve rounds in the magazine. It was a lot of firepower to capture one man. Assuming that the orders were to capture.

  Now Ambler walked heavily across the street to the idling retrieval van. Its passengers had fanned out around the area of the Baskerton lobby; it would be only moments before they realized their error.

  Ambler approached the driver’s door of the white van, flipped open the wallet that had belonged to the Parrish Island supervisor, and held it up to the driver for a brief moment, as if displaying a badge or certificate. He was too far away for the driver to make anything out; the authority of the gesture itself would have to convince. As the driver powered down the window, Ambler took his measure. The man’s eyes were hard, watchful, and his neck was short and thickly muscled: a weight lifter.