The Ambler Warning Read online

  The monster.

  The facts were carefully detailed in the PSU dossier. It revealed the murderous fanaticism that lay beneath the candidate’s fifth-columnist pose of moderation and sweet reasonableness. It exposed his ideological ties with the Khmer Rouge. His personal involvement with the “Golden Triangle” drug trade—and with a string of political murders throughout Taiwan.

  There was no way to unmask him without compromising dozens of assets, leaving them to face torture and death at the hands of Leung’s secret confederates. Yet he could not be allowed to succeed—to take his place at the helm of Taiwan’s National Congress. It was to ensure the survival of democracy itself that the poisoned populist had to be removed from the democratic arena.

  That was the kind of job that the Stab unit specialized in. The ruthlessness of some of its operations earned it the disapproval of those State Department intelligence analysts with soft hearts and softer heads. In truth, unpalatable action was sometimes necessary to fend off even more unpalatable consequences. Undersecretary Ellen Whitfield, Stab’s director, was devoted to that principle with a single-mindedness that made her peculiarly effective. Where other unit directors were content to analyze and assess, Whitfield would act—and do so early. “Remove the cancer before it spreads” was both her motto and her record when it came to political threats. Ellen Whitfield did not believe in endless diplomatic temporizing when the peace could be kept by means of a swift, surgical intervention. Seldom, though, had the stakes been so great.

  Tarquin’s earpiece crackled softly. “Alpha One in position,” a voice murmured. Translation: the team’s explosive-ordnance technician had established himself at a safe distance from where he had secreted his device, ready to activate the radio-controlled detonator at Tarquin’s signal. The operation was complex because it had to be. Leung’s family, fearing for his safety and distrustful of the state police, had provided him with an elaborate security team. All the obvious snipers’ nests would have already been checked out and cleared. Other guards, expert in both the ancient traditions of the martial arts and the newer ones of contemporary combat, would scan the crowd, and some would be planted within it at regular intervals: any sign of a weapon would be met with force. Leung traveled in an armored car, stayed at hotel rooms carefully guarded by loyalists. None would imagine that the threat lurked within the ordinary-looking podium.

  Now it was showtime.

  From the growing rustle of the crowd Tarquin knew that the candidate had made his appearance. Tarquin looked up as Leung stepped smartly onto the dais.

  Applause began and grew, and the candidate beamed. He was not yet positioned directly in front of the podium, however, which was crucial. To avoid collateral injuries, the small explosive device had been designed to have a precise directionality. Tarquin waited, holding the props of a journalist’s narrow notepad and ballpoint pen.

  Awaiting your signal, a metallic voice was prompting him from his earpiece. A signal that meant death.

  Awaiting your signal.

  The sound changed to another, as the air temperature seemed to drop, and he heard a faint noise again—the very noise that, he now realized, had awakened him into the here and now, thousands of miles across the world and more than two years later.

  Ambler tossed in his motel bed, the sheets knotted and clammy with sweat. The noise—a rattling from the bedside table. The slain man’s BlackBerry was vibrating, indicating the arrival of a text message. Ambler reached for it and, after pressing a few buttons, confirmed that a reply to his e-mail had arrived. The message was brief but conveyed precise instructions. A rendezvous had been arranged for two-thirty that afternoon, at the Philadelphia International Airport. Gate C19.

  They were clever. They were effectively using the airport’s security staff and metal detectors for their own purposes, ensuring that he would arrive unarmed. The public nature of the arena provided further protection against any violent moves on his part. Yet the hour selected was when the fewest people would actually be waiting for flights. In a largely vacant part of the terminal—and Ambler was certain that they had selected the specific gate with this in mind, too—they would have some measure of seclusion. Isolated enough for privacy, public enough for security. Well done. They knew what they were doing. It was not an entirely comforting thought.

  Clayton Caston sat at the breakfast table, dressed, as usual, in one of his dozen nearly interchangeable gray suits. When he had bought them, mail-order, from the Jos. A. Bank clothiers catalog, they had been marked 50 percent off, so the price point seemed very reasonable to him, and the wool/polyester blend minimized wrinkling, which was very practical. “Year-round executive three-button suit,” the catalog said: an “all-season blend.” Caston took the clothiers at their word; he wore the same suits all year round. So, too, with the repp ties, red with green stripes or blue with red stripes. He realized some of his colleagues considered his nearly unvarying attire eccentric. But what was the point of variety for its own sake? You found something that did what it was supposed to do, and you stuck with it.

  It was the same with his breakfast. He liked cornflakes. Cornflakes were what he had in the morning; cornflakes were what he was having now.

  “That is such bull!” his sixteen-year-old daughter, Andrea, exploded. She wasn’t talking to him, of course; she was talking to her brother, Max, older by one year. “Chip is gross. Anyway, he’s into Jennifer, not me—thank God!”

  “You are so transparent,” Max said implacably.

  “Use one of the grapefruit knives if you’re cutting grapefruit,” their mother said, mildly reproving. “That’s why we’ve got them.” She was dressed in a terry-cloth bathrobe, her feet in terry-cloth slippers, her hair held back in a terry-cloth headband. To Clay Caston, she was still a vision of loveliness.

  Max accepted the curved grapefruit knife without a word; he was still needling his sister. “Chip hates Jennifer and Jennifer hates Chip, and you made sure of it when you told Chip what Jennifer said about him to T.J. And, by the way, I hope you let Mom know about what happened in your French class yesterday.”

  “Don’t you dare!” Andrea jumped up from her seat, in a towering sixteen-year-old rage. “Why don’t we talk about the little scratch on the side of the Volvo? It wasn’t there before you went out with it last night. Think Mom’s noticed yet?”

  “What kind of a scratch?” Linda Caston asked, putting down her pond-sized mug of black coffee.

  Max gave his sister a smoldering look, as if he was trying to come up with some regimen of torture that would begin to serve justice.

  “Let’s just say Mad Max hasn’t mastered the subtleties of parallel parking yet.”

  “You know something?” Max said, not taking his eyes from his sister. “I think it’s time your friend Chip and I had a talk.”

  Caston looked up from his Washington Post. He was acutely aware that he did not figure large in the consciousness of his two children right now, and he minded not at all. That they were his own children in the first place was something of a mystery to him, so little did they take after him.

  “You wouldn’t dare, you little toad.”

  “What kind of a scratch?” Linda repeated.

  The others at the table were going at one another as if he didn’t exist. Caston was used to it. Even at the breakfast table, he was the world’s most nondescript bureaucrat, and Andrea and Max were slightly absurd and self-absorbed, as adolescents always were. Andrea, with her raspberry-scented lip gloss and her marker-decorated jeans; Max, budding star of the high school gridiron who never remembered to shave his neck properly and wore too much Aqua Velva. Caston mentally corrected himself: any amount of Aqua Velva would be too much.

  They were an undisciplined, rambunctious couple of brats, who would start squabbling over the slightest scrap. And Clayton Caston loved them like life itself.

  “Is there any orange juice left?” Caston’s first words at the breakfast table.

  Max handed him the carton.
The inner life of his son was largely opaque to Caston, but every once in a while, he saw something close to pity in Max’s expression: a young man trying to categorize his dad according to the anthropological categories of high school—jock, stud, geek, dweeb, loser—and realizing that if they were classmates they definitely wouldn’t hang out together. “There’s a swallow or two left, Dad,” he said.

  “One swallow does not make a spring,” Caston replied.

  Max shot him an uneasy look. “Whatever.”

  “We need to talk about the scratch,” said Linda.

  There was less shouting in Caleb Norris’s office at the CIA two hours later, but the hushed voices only emphasized the heightened tension. Norris was an Assistant Deputy Director of Intelligence, and when he had summoned Caston for a 9:30 A.M. meeting, he did not tell him what it was about. He did not have to. Since the Parrish Island bulletin had arrived the previous morning, further signals—most of them conflicting and maddeningly vague—had come in, suggesting that there had been additional disturbances related to the incident.

  Norris had the broad face of a Russian peasant, with a lumpy complexion and small, wide-spaced eyes. He was barrel-chested and hirsute; wisps of black hair emerged from his shirt cuffs and, whenever he removed his tie, from his shirt collar. Although he was the agency’s senior-most officer in intelligence analysis and a member of the director’s inner circle, someone who had only seen Norris in a photograph would place him in an entirely different profession—that of a bouncer, say, or a mobster’s bodyguard. Nor did his shop-steward manners give any inkling of his curriculum vitae: an undergraduate degree in physics at the Catholic University of America; a National Science Foundation fellowship to work on the military applications of game theory; stints at civilian organizations such as the Institute for Defense Analyses and the Lambda Corporation. Norris was too impatient for a traditional career, he recognized early on, yet at the agency his impatience became a virtue. He pushed through the logjams and bottlenecks that left others behind. He realized the extent to which power in an organization is the power you assume, not the power formally accorded to your position. It was a matter of not taking “we’re still working on it” for an answer. Caston admired that about him.

  When Caston appeared at the door, Norris was in a characteristic posture of agitation—pacing his office, his stout arms folded on his chest. Norris was not so much worried by the Parrish Island incident as he was annoyed by it. It annoyed him because it reminded him how much of the intelligence establishment was outside the purview of its titular director. That was the larger problem, and a perennial one. Every division of the military—the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—had its internal intelligence units, while, along different lines, the Department of Defense lavished its resources on the Defense Intelligence Agency. The White House’s National Security Council retained a separate staff of intelligence analysts. The National Security Agency, in Fort Meade, had its own vast infrastructure, largely devoted to “signals intelligence”; additional signals work was done by the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The State Department supported a bureau of intelligence and research, in addition to its clandestine-service division, Consular Operations. And every organization was further partitioned internally. The fissures and fault lines were numerous, and each represented the potential for catastrophic failure.

  Hence a seemingly minor annoyance like this bulletin bothered Norris like an ingrown hair. It was one thing not to know what was happening on the steppes of Uzbekistan; it was another to be in the dark when it came to your own backyard. How was it that nobody seemed to know who it was who had escaped from Parrish Island?

  The facility was used on a “joint resource” basis by all branches of America’s clandestine services. A man who was not only detained at Parrish Island but, so it appeared, was kept isolated in a locked ward was presumably a very dangerous man indeed, either because of what he was capable of disclosing or what he was capable of doing.

  But when the office of the CIA’s director had inquired as to the identity of the escaped man, nobody had an answer. That was either madness, of a kind untreated in Parrish Island, or something like insubordination.

  “Here’s the thing,” the ADDI said to Caston, blurting it out when Caston entered, as if they were already in the midst of conversation. “Every patient in that facility goes with a—whaddaya call it?—a requisition signature, a billing code. ‘Joint resource’ means every agency contributes to the extent they use it. If Langley checks in a looney-tunes analyst, Langley foots his bill, or some chunk of it. If it’s someone at Fort Meade, Ford Meade gets billed. Meaning, every patient comes with a billing code. Twelve-digit. For security reasons, the payment procedure is kept separate from the operations files, but the records are supposed to give the name of the officer who authorized the custodial detention. Only not this time. I’m hoping you can figure out what’s gone wrong. The Parrish Island account records tell us that the billing code for the patient worked—the financials were always just fine. But now the accounts guys at Consular say they can’t find the billing code in their database. Ergo, we haven’t even figured out who authorized his detention.”

  “I’ve never known that to happen.”

  Another gust of indignation returned to fill Norris’s sails. “Either they’re telling us the truth, in which case they’re screwed, or they’re stonewalling, in which case they’re screwing us. And if so, I’d like to figure out a way to screw them back.” Norris tended to speak in disjunctions—either–ors—when he was agitated. The ADDI’s light blue shirt was growing wetly dark beneath his arms. “But that’s my fight, not yours. What I want from you, Clay, is a lantern in the darkness. My usual request, right?”

  Caston bowed his head. “If they’re stonewalling, Cal, it’s on a very high level. I can tell you that already.”

  The ADDI turned an expectant gaze toward him and made a summoning gesture with his hand. “More” was all Norris said.

  “It’s pretty clear that the fugitive is a former high-value agent.”

  “An HVA who went off his rocker.”

  “That’s what we’re told. Best I can figure, Consular Operations has given us ‘file front’ info on Patient 5312. And we got a psych profile zapped over from Parrish Island. Dozens of database fields, filled with terms from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. Basically, he’s a severe dissociative.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning he thinks he’s someone he isn’t.”

  “Then who is he?”

  “That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it?”

  “Goddammit,” Norris said, nearly crying out in exasperation. “How can you just lose somebody’s identity, like a goddamn sock in the dryer?” His eyes flashed with anger. After a moment, he reached out and patted Caston on the side of his shoulder, and a wheedling smile appeared on his face. Caston, he knew, could be prickly: one enlisted his efforts, one did not presume them. If Caston felt bullied, he reacted badly, could retract into the ordinary bureaucrat he affected to be. Caleb Norris had learned that lesson early on. Now the ADDI focused his charm on the stoop-shouldered numbers cruncher. “Did I ever tell you how much I like your tie? It’s you.”

  Caston acknowledged the affectionate japery with a wince of a smile. “Don’t try to get on my good side, Caleb. I don’t have a good side.” He shrugged. “Here’s the situation. Like I say, psychiatric files we’ve got, all indexed under the patient number, 5312. But the information they’ve got doesn’t retrieve any Cons Ops personnel files—no matter what root you probe in the system. The personnel details don’t come up.”

  “Meaning they’ve been erased.”

  “Meaning, more likely, that they’ve been disconnected. In all probability, the data exists somewhere, but it isn’t linked to a digital ID anybody has access to. It’s the digital equivalent of a severed spinal cord.”

  “Sounds l
ike you’ve spent time roaming through the computer system there.”

  “The major systems at State aren’t integrated internally, and there are major-league platform incompatibilities with our systems. But they use the same comma-delimited back-office program we do for payroll, deductibilities, costing information, and procurement.” Caston rattled off these accounting categories like a waiter speeding through the daily specials. “If you know your way around back-office accounts management, you get the equivalent of a plank you might use to board one ship from another.”

  “Like Captain Kidd chasing Bluebeard.”

  “Hate to break it to you, but I’m not sure there really was a Bluebeard. So I seriously doubt he makes any appearance on Captain Kidd’s résumé.”

  “No Bluebeard? Next you’re gonna be telling me there’s no Santa, either?”

  “Sounds like you got fed some bad intel from your parents, there,” Caston said, straight-faced. “Holiday disinformation. May need to scrub your tooth-fairy files, too, while you’re at it.” He scanned Norris’s desk, looking slightly disapprovingly at the messy piles of unsorted memos. “But I think you’ve got the general idea. A person would rather be escorted onto a ship the proper way. When there’s no alternative, though, a long plank can be surprisingly effective.”

  “So what did you learn once you got that plank out and galloped across it?”

  “Not a lot so far. We’re still combing through the patient records. And there’s a partial ops record, under his field alias, Tarquin.”

  “Tarquin,” Norris repeated. “A field alias but no name. Curious and curiouser. Anyway, what do we know about this guy?”

  “The main thing we know is that Agent Tarquin wasn’t just Cons Ops. He was a member of the Political Stabilization Unit.”