The Ambler Warning Page 5

  “You guys get the change in orders?” Ambler demanded. “It’s kill, not capture. And what took you so long? If you’d been in place a minute earlier, we’d be all done.”

  The driver said nothing for a moment. Then his gaze hardened. “That thing you showed me? I couldn’t see it.”

  Suddenly Ambler felt the man’s big, beefy hand grab his right wrist.

  “I said I couldn’t see it.” The driver’s voice was low, menacing. “Show me again.”

  With his left hand, Ambler reached into his jacket for the pistol he had taken from the guardsman on the boat, but the driver was superbly trained, with lightning fast reflexes; he smashed the heel of his free hand into the P7, sending the weapon flying into the air. Ambler had to act immediately. He wrenched his wrist around, yanked it toward his body and up to the level of his shoulders, then, sharply, down, using his forearm like a crowbar, and slammed the driver’s arm against the edge of the mostly lowered window.

  The driver yelped, but he didn’t let go. His grip was like steel. With his other hand, he was beginning to feel for an under-the-dashboard compartment, no doubt where a weapon of some sort was stored.

  Ambler let his right arm go limp, let the driver pull him part of the way into the cab. Then, with his other hand, he spear-punched the man’s larynx with a carefully aimed blow.

  The driver released him and leaned forward, both hands tearing at his collar. He was struggling for breath, as the ruined cartilage impeded his airflow. Ambler opened the door and pulled the driver from his seat. The man took a few steps away from the van before collapsing to the ground.

  As Ambler climbed aboard, gunned the motor, and sped down the street, he could hear the cries of confusion among the men of the second unit. But it was too late for them to take action.

  Ambler did not envy the team leader who had to explain how the parcel not only had escaped from under their noses but escaped in the team’s own vehicle. Yet his maneuver involved no calculation or forethought. Reflecting upon it now, he realized that his actions sprang from the look on the first man’s face: searching, wary—and uncertain. A hunter who was not sure whether he had found his quarry. The retrieval team had been dispatched too quickly to have been provided with photographs. Ambler was expected to do what fugitives almost invariably do in such situations: identify himself by attempting to flee. But how to give chase when the fox was running with the hounds?

  The van was serving admirably as a getaway car; within minutes, though, it would become a glaring beacon, signaling his presence to his pursuers. A few miles farther down Connecticut Avenue, Ambler eased the van into a side street and left it idling once more, with the keys in the ignition. If he was very lucky, someone would steal it.

  At this point, anonymity would be best secured by a populous area that was both a residential and a business neighborhood—a neighborhood that contained embassies, art museums, churches, bookstores, apartment buildings. A place with a brisk pedestrian traffic. A place like Dupont Circle, then. At the intersection of three of the city’s major avenues, Dupont Circle had long been a thriving neighborhood, and even on this dismal winter morning the sidewalks were reasonably full. Ambler took a cab there, getting out at New Hampshire Avenue and Twentieth Street and swiftly losing himself among the day-trippers. He had a destination in mind but maintained an expression of bored aimlessness.

  As he walked through the crowds, he tried to stay aware of his surroundings without making eye contact with anyone. Yet whenever his gaze alighted upon a passerby, the old feeling returned: especially in his hyperalert state, it was as if he were reading a page from someone’s diary. It took only a glance to register the hurrying step of the sixtyish woman with peach-blond hair, a navy kick-pleat skirt showing beneath an open check-patterned coat, large gold-plated earrings, a plastic Ann Taylor shopping bag gripped too tightly by an age-spotted hand. She had spent hours getting ready to go out, and out meant shopping. A pouting loneliness flickered on her countenance; the raindrops on her cheeks might as well have been tears. She was childless, Ambler guessed, and maybe that, too, was a source of regret. In her past, no doubt, there was a husband who was going to make her whole and complete her life, a husband who—ten years ago? longer?—got restless and found someone younger, fresher, to make him whole and complete his life. Now she collected store-specific charge cards and met people for tea and played rubbers at bridge, but maybe not so often as she would have liked; Ambler sensed a larger disappointment with people. She probably suspected that her own sadness repelled them in some subliminal way; they were too busy for her, and her isolation only made her sadness deeper, her company all the less appealing to others. And so she shopped, bought clothing that was too youthful for her, pursuing “bargains” and “deep discounts” for apparel that looked no more expensive than it was. Was Ambler’s every supposition correct? It hardly mattered: he knew the essential truth was in there.

  His eyes took in a slouchy young black man, wearing low-slung jeans and a visored cap pulled down over a bandanna, a diamond stud in one ear, and a patch of beard below his lip. He was drenched in Aramis cologne and his gaze drifted across the street to another young man—proud and preppy looking, with an athlete’s trouser-rubbing thighs, and long blond hair—then he shifted his gaze back, wrested it back, determined not to betray his interest. A full-breasted, cocoa-skinned girl with straightened hair and glossy dark lipstick on her pillowy lips, short despite her stilettos, was working hard to keep up with the young black man: her boyfriend, or so he let her imagine. Eventually she’d wonder why her boyfriend, preening and cocky on the street, was so chaste and hesitant when they were alone. Why their dates ended so early, and where he really went off afterward. But Ambler could tell she was still innocent of any such thoughts—any inkling that he could truly be who he was only with other young men like himself.

  The cybercafe was where Ambler remembered it, near Seventeenth and Church, three blocks east of the circle. He identified a computer station that afforded him a good view of its storefront window; he would not be caught unaware again. With a few keystrokes, he brought up the Watchlist, a collective database coordinated by the Justice Department for use by multiple federal agencies involved in law enforcement. Dimly remembered pass codes still functioned, he was reassured to find. Now he typed his full name, Harrison Ambler, into the internal search engine; he wanted to see if there was any flag on his name. After a few moments, a message was displayed.

  NO RECORDS MATCH HARRISON AMBLER.

  It was an odd glitch; any federal employee, even one who was no longer on the payrolls, should have had at least a perfunctory listing. And though his Cons Ops identity was necessarily sequestered from such databases, his civilian cover job at the State Department was a matter of public record.

  With a shrug of annoyance, he keyed his way to the State Department Web site and then went behind a firewall to a password-protected, albeit low-security, internal employee database. Verifying his civilian cover job should have been straightforward. For years, Hal Ambler could always explain, if anyone asked, that he was a midlevel staffer at the State Department, working at the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. It was a subject—“cultural diplomacy,” “friendship through education,” and so on—that he could hold forth upon at earnest and eye-glazing length, if required to. Never mind that it had nothing whatever to do with his real career.

  He used to wonder what would happen if he gave a candid answer when someone at a cocktail party asked him what he did. Me? I work for an ultraclandestine division of an already clandestine intelligence service called Consular Operations. A special-access program, with maybe twenty-five people in the government cleared for it. It’s called the Political Stabilization Unit. What does it do? Well, a lot of things. Often enough, it involves killing people. People who, you hope, are worse than the people you save from them. But, of course, you can’t always be sure. Can I get you another drink?

  Typing his name into the State Departme
nt database, he clicked RETURN and waited a few long seconds for the results.

  EMPLOYEE HARRISON AMBLER NOT FOUND. PLEASE VERIFY SPELLING AND TRY AGAIN.

  His eyes swept across the window that overlooked the street, and though he saw no sign of unusual activity, he felt himself breaking out in a cold sweat. He keyed his way into the Social Security database and ran a search for his name.

  HARRISON AMBLER NOT FOUND.

  It made no sense! Methodically, he summoned more databases, conducting search after search. One after another yielded a maddening refrain, variations on a theme of negation.

  YOUR SEARCH DID NOT MATCH ANY DOCUMENTS. NO RECORDS WERE LOCATED FOR “HARRISON AMBLER.”

  HARRISON AMBLER NOT FOUND.

  Half an hour later, he had plumbed more than nineteen federal and state databases. All to no avail. It was as if he had never existed.

  Madness!

  Like a distant foghorn, the voices of various Parrish Island psychiatrists returned to him, with their spurious diagnoses. It was nonsense, of course—all nonsense. It had to be. He knew precisely who he was. Until the period of his institutionalization, his memory of his life was vivid, clear, and continuous. It was, to be sure, an unusual life—entangled in an unusual vocation—but it was the only one he had. There must have been some mix-up, some technical error: he was certain of it.

  He typed in another rapid succession of keystrokes, rewarded only by another null response. And he began to wonder whether certainty had become a luxury. A luxury he could no longer afford.

  A white car—no, a van, moving too fast, faster than the stream of traffic, suddenly came into view. And then another. And a third, pulling up directly in front of the café.

  How had he been located so fast? If the cybercafe had registered the IP address of its private network and a digital trigger had been installed within the State Department database, his own probing would have activated a counterprobe—and the physical address of the TCP/IP network device he had been using.

  Ambler sprang to his feet, pushed his way past an Employees Only door, and raced up the stairs—if he was fortunate, he would find his way to the roof and then to the roof of an adjoining building. . . . But he had to move fast, before the retrieval team was fully positioned. And while his muscles pumped and he began to gulp air, a fleeting thought passed through his mind. If Hal Ambler doesn’t exist, who are they after?

  THREE

  Sanctuary was what it had always meant to him. It was a single-pen cabin, nothing but local timber from the ridgepole on top to the butting pole down below. As a shelter, it was almost as primeval as the nature that surrounded it. The ceiling and floor joists, the eaves beams, even the stick-and-mud chimney—he had done it all himself, in the course of one warm, buggy June, using little more than a pile of wood and a gas-powered chain saw. It was meant for one person, and he had only ever been there alone. He never spoke of it to anyone he knew. In violation of the rules, he had not told his employers about the acquisition of the lakeside parcel—an acquisition that, to further protect his privacy, he’d arranged through a hard-to-trace offshore business entity. The cabin was nobody else’s. It was his alone. And there had been times when he’d arrived back at Dulles International Airport, unable to face the world, and would drive nonstop to the simple wood dwelling, covering the 180 miles in just three hours. He’d take his boat out and go fishing for smallmouth bass and try to save some part of his soul from the maze of deceit and subterfuge that was his vocation.

  Lake Aswell hardly merited a spot of blue on any map, but it was a part of the world that made his heart swell. Located at the base of the Sourland Mountains, it was an area where farmland gave way to a thickly wooded terrain, and was surrounded by stands of willow, birch, and pignut hickory, above a sometimes thick underbrush. In the spring and summer, the grounds were dense with foliage, alive with flowers, berries. Now, in January, most of the trees were drab and leafless. Even so, there was a somber elegance to it all: the elegance of potential. Like him, the woodland needed a season of recuperation.

  He was bone weary, the price of long hours of vigilance. The car he started out with was an old blue Dodge Ram minivan, which he had picked up a few blocks from the cybercafe. It was an awkward, boaty ride; what recommended it was simply that its owner had affixed a StorAKey box inside the wheel well. The box was a foolish contraption, used by drivers who valued the security of a spare key more than the security of their vehicles. The twelve-year-old green Honda Civic he was now driving came from the Trenton train station’s overnight parking area and had been protected from theft with similar vigilance, or lack thereof. It was as anonymous a model as he could hope for, and, so far, it had done its job.

  His mind churned as he drove north on Route 31. Who had done this to him? It was the same question that had preyed on him for untold months. The legitimate, if clandestine, facilities of the United States government had been mobilized against him. Which meant—what? That someone had lied about him, had somehow set him up, had persuaded higher authorities that he had gone mad, had become a security threat. Or that someone or some group with access to the powers of state had sought to make him vanish. Someone or some group that considered him a threat but that nonetheless chose not to kill him. His head began to throb; a headache was opening behind his eyes, like a malignant flower. There were colleagues of his at the Political Stabilization Unit who could help him—but how could he find them? These were not men and women who reported for work at desk jobs; they changed their location regularly, like pieces on a chessboard. And he had somehow been locked out of every electronic forum he knew about. Harrison Ambler not found—it was madness, yet there was method in it, too. He could feel it, feel the malignity like the pulsing headache that made conscious thought a kind of agony. They had tried to lose him. They had tried to bury him. They! The exasperating bare plural They! A word that said everything and nothing at all.

  To survive, he needed to know more, yet he could not know more unless he survived. Barrington Falls, in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, was off a stretch of Route 31 that flowed through the central New Jersey countryside, crosshatched by unmarked intersections with small streets. Twice he pulled into one of those side streets, to make sure he wasn’t being followed, but there was no sign of it. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard when he saw the small road sign for Barrington Falls; it was 3:30 P.M. Only this morning he was being held in a maximum-security psychiatric facility. Now he was nearly home.

  A quarter of a mile south of the access road to the lake, he pulled the Honda Civic off the road and left it hidden in a copse of hemlock and cedar trees. The fiber-filled tan jacket he had picked up en route kept him warm. As he walked along the springy ground, his footfalls softly crunching on the carpet of leaves and pine needles, he felt the tension beginning to drain from him. Drawing nearer to the lake, he found that he recognized every tree. He heard the fluttering of an owl in the enormous bald cypress tree, its reddish trunk seemingly barkless, gnarled and grooved like an old crone’s neck. He could just make out the rubblework chimney of old man McGruder’s saddlebag cabin, perilously close to the water on the far bank. It always looked as if one big storm could wash it right into the lake.

  Just past a dense stand of spruce trees, he pushed through the wooded enclave and reached the magical glade where, seven years ago, he had decided to build his cabin. Curtained by magnificent old evergreens on three sides, it provided not only seclusion but tranquility: a peaceful view of the lake framed by ancient trees.

  He had returned, at last. Taking a deep, cleansing breath, he stepped through a gap in the line of firs and looked around at—

  —a small, empty glade where his cabin should have been. The same clearing he had come upon seven years earlier, when he had decided to build there.

  A wave of dizziness and disorientation overtook him; he felt as if the ground were rippling beneath his feet. It was impossible. There was no cabin. No cabin and no trace that a cabin had ever been
built here. The vegetation was utterly undisturbed. His memory of where he had sited the single-pen structure was indelible—and yet all he could see were patches of moss, a ground-hugging sprawl of juniper, and a low, deer-cropped yew tree that looked to be at least twenty or thirty years old. He walked around the area, circling it, eyes alert to any sign of human habitation, past or present. Nothing. It was a virgin parcel of land, precisely in the state it had been when he had acquired it. Finally he could no longer fend off the daze of incomprehension, and he sank to his knees on the cold, mossy ground. Even to frame the question filled him with fear, and yet he had to: Could he trust his own memories? The past seven years of his life—start with those. Were his recollections real? Or was his current experience the illusion—would he awake any moment and discover himself to be in his white locked room in Ward 4W?

  He remembered having once been told that, when dreaming, a person has no sense of smell. If so, he was not dreaming. He could smell the lake water, the subtle fragrances of organic decay, of leaf mold and earthworm castings, the faint resinous odor of conifers. No, it was—God help him—no dream.

  Which is exactly what made it a nightmare.

  He rose to his feet and let out a low guttural roar of fury and frustration. He had arrived at his soul’s own home, and there was no home. A captive could at least nurture the hope of escape; the torture victim—he knew this firsthand—had at least the hope of easeful respite. But what hope had a creature that has lost its sanctuary?

  Everything here was familiar, and nothing was. That was what was so maddening. He began to pace, listening to the chirps and whistles of winter birds. Then he heard a faint, whistling noise of a different kind and felt a sharp sensation—combining pain and a sense of percussive force—just below his neck.