The Ambler Warning Read online

  “If he’s a Stab guy, he’s probably a wet-work expert.”

  Wet work. Caston despised such euphemisms. The evidence all suggested the agent was a dangerous sociopath. That seemed to be a job requirement for a successful career at PSU. “We only know scraps about his ops record. The PSU connection I was able to make by the coding system. Their staff has a 7588 suffix to their ID numbers, and we pulled that from the 5312 records at the facility. But when we turn to the State databases, things get grim: the rest has been delinked from the Tarquin folder.”

  “So what’s your gut tell you?”

  “My gut?”

  “Yeah, what do your instincts say?”

  It took Caston a moment to realize that Norris was putting him on.

  Early in their working relationship, Caston had made his scorn for the notion of “gut instinct” abundantly clear. It was, in fact, something of a hobbyhorse with him. He was deeply annoyed when people asked for him to provide a “gut response” before the data had provided any real direction: as far as Caston was concerned, to go on hunches was to go off half-cocked. It prevented one from analyzing things logically; it impeded the workings of reason and the rigorous techniques of probabilistic analysis.

  Caston watched as Norris’s face split into a grin; the ADDI enjoyed goading Caston into delivering his firmly held convictions on the subject.

  “I’m just busting your balls,” Norris said. “But tell me, what are we supposed to make of this guy? What does your, ah, decision matrix say?”

  Caston responded with a thin smile. “It’s all highly preliminary. But, again, there are several data points that suggest he’s a bad egg. I guess you know my views about agents who color outside the lines. If you’re on the payroll, you’re supposed to comply with the parameters established by federal decrees. There’s a reason for that. You can talk about ‘wet work.’ The way I see it, either a practice is authorized or it isn’t. There’s no middle path. I want to know why we have people like this ‘Tarquin’ in the employ of the federal government. When will our intelligence services learn that it never works?”

  “Never works?” Norris raised an eyebrow.

  “Never works as planned.”

  “Nothing in creation ever does. Including creation itself. And God had seven days to get it right. I can only give you three.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “Just a feeling I have.” Norris raised a hand, preempting Caston’s reproval. “Truth is, the intelligence directorate has been getting signals—they’re nonspecific, but they’re persistent enough that we can’t ignore them—about some sort of off-the-books activity that’s going on. By us? Against us? I don’t know yet, and neither does the DCI. We think it involves highly placed members of the government—and that whatever it is, it’s been fast-tracked. So we’re all on alert. Anything irregular—well, we can’t know whether it’s connected or not, but it’s dangerous to presume otherwise. So we need a definitive report from you in three days. Find out who this Tarquin really is. Help us bring him in. Or bring him down.”

  Caston nodded stonily. He did not need encouragement. Caston detested anomalies, and the man who escaped from Parrish Island was an anomaly of the worst kind. Nothing could bring Caston greater satisfaction than identifying this anomaly—and eliminating it.

  SIX

  At the Motel 6 near Flemington, New Jersey, Hal Ambler used the slain man’s Nokia to place a number of phone calls. First was to the U.S. Department of State. He could make no assumptions, at this point: he could not know whether his relation to the intelligence unit in which he had spent his career was one of friend or foe. He could not use the emergency numbers he had memorized as an operative, in case that triggered a tracing mechanism. Instead, it would be safer to knock on the front door. Accordingly, the first call he made was to the State Department communications office. Pretending to be a reporter from Reuters International, he requested that he be connected to the office of Undersecretary Ellen Whitfield. Could she confirm a statement that had been attributed to her? Her assistant, to whom he was connected after a number of intermediate relays, was apologetic. The undersecretary was traveling, part of an overseas delegation.

  Was it possible to be more specific? the Reuters correspondent asked. The assistant was sorry, but she could not.

  An overseas delegation: no doubt the information was accurate. It was also essentially useless.

  Ellen Whitfield’s official designation as an “undersecretary” in the Department of State blandly concealed her real administrative charge as the director of the Political Stabilization Unit. His boss, in short.

  Did his colleagues think he was dead? Mad? Vanished? What did Ellen Whitfield know about what had happened to him?

  The questions eddied in his mind. If she did not know, she would want to know, wouldn’t she? He struggled to recall the period of time just before he had found himself a captive in a psychiatric penal colony. Yet those last memories remained opaque, encased, inaccessible—hidden within the fog that had eclipsed his existence. He tried to inventory what he could recall before that fog settled in. He recalled the few days he spent in Nepal, visiting with the leaders of a group of self-identified Tibetan dissidents who were seeking American assistance. They were dissembling, Ambler swiftly concluded: in fact, they were representatives of a Maoist insurgency that had been repudiated by China and banished by Nepal’s own struggling government. The Stab operation at Changhua commenced thereafter—preparing for the “removal” of Wai-Chan Leung—and then? His mind was like a torn page: there was no sharp line separating recollection from oblivion; rather, it feathered irregularly to an end.

  It was the same when he tried to push back his memories of Parrish Island to before the final months. So many of his earlier memories were fractured moments, stripped of any sense of time or sequence.

  Perhaps he needed to go further back—before the weeks surrounding his abduction, to the time when his memories of his life were vivid, continuous, were as real as the ground beneath his feet. If only he could find someone who would share those memories. Someone whose reminiscences would provide the corroboration he desperately needed: the assurance that he was who he was.

  On impulse, Ambler called directory assistance for Dylan Sutcliffe in Providence, Rhode Island.

  Dylan Sutcliffe was someone he had scarcely thought about for years, someone he’d met half a lifetime ago. He had met Dylan when they were both freshmen at Carlyle College, a small liberal arts school in Connecticut, and they hit it off at once. Dylan was a cutup, with a gift for gab and a great store of tales about growing up in Pepper Pike, Ohio. He also had a pronounced weakness for pranks.

  One morning in late October—it was their sophomore year—the campus woke up to discover that an enormous pumpkin had appeared on the spire of McIntyre Tower. The pumpkin had to have weighed nearly seventy pounds, and how it materialized there was a mystery. It was a source of merriment among the students and consternation among the administrators: no maintenance worker would agree to risk his neck in order to bring it down, so the pumpkin was left to make its way down by itself. The next morning, a cluster of small jack-o’-lanterns appeared at the base of McIntyre Tower, positioned as if looking up at the big pumpkin overhead; some of them bore signs saying JUMP! The undergraduate glee only heightened the ill humor of the college officials. A few months before graduation, two years later, when the administration was no longer so exercised, the word finally went around that the class had Dylan Sutcliffe, an expert and well-equipped rock climber, to thank. Sutcliffe was a prankster but a prudent one; he never directly owned up to it and had always appreciated Ambler’s discretion. For Ambler, having noticed something in Sutcliffe’s face when the matter was discussed, was the first to guess that he was behind it, and though he let Sutcliffe know that he knew, he never told anyone else.

  Ambler remembered the Charlie Brown–style shirts Sutcliffe favored, with their broad, colorful horizontal stripes, and his collection of
clay pipes, seldom used, but more interesting than the usual undergraduate collection of beer bottles or Grateful Dead basement tapes. Ambler recalled attending his wedding just a year after graduation, knew that he had a good job at a Providence community bank, once independent, now part of a national chain.

  “This is Dylan Sutcliffe,” a voice now said. Ambler did not immediately recognize it, but he was overcome with warmth all the same.

  “Dylan!” Ambler said. “It’s Hal Ambler. Remember me?”

  There was a long pause. “I’m sorry,” the man said, sounding confused. “I’m not sure I caught your name.”

  “Hal Ambler. We were at Carlyle together two decades ago. You were in my suite, freshman year. I was at your wedding. Coming back now? Been a long time between drinks, huh?”

  “Listen, I don’t buy things from strangers over the phone,” the man said curtly. “I suggest you try this on somebody else.”

  Could this be the wrong Dylan Sutcliffe? Nothing about him sounded like the Sutcliffe he remembered. “Whoa,” he said. “Maybe I got the wrong guy. You didn’t go to Carlyle, then?”

  “I did. It’s just that nobody in my class was named Hal Ambler.” There was a click as the man hung up on him.

  Roiled by a mixture of anger and fear, he now called Carlyle College and got himself transferred to the registrar’s office. To the young man who answered, Ambler explained that he was a human-resources officer for a major corporation, prospective employer of one Harrison Ambler. As a matter of corporate policy, they were verifying certain items on the applicant’s résumé. All he had to do was confirm that Harrison Ambler had indeed graduated from Carlyle College.

  “Certainly, sir,” the man from the registrar’s office said. He asked for the spelling and entered the name; Ambler could hear quiet, swift clicking from a keyboard. “Sorry,” the voice said. “Could you give me the spelling one more time?”

  With a growing sense of apprehension, Ambler did so.

  “I guess it’s a good thing you called,” said the voice on the phone.

  “He didn’t graduate?”

  “Nobody by that name has ever matriculated here, let alone graduated.”

  “Is it possible that your database doesn’t go back far enough?”

  “Nope. We’re a real small college, so that’s one problem we don’t have. Believe me, sir, if this guy was enrolled here at any time during the twentieth century, I’d know.”

  “Thank you,” Ambler said, his voice hollow. “Thank you for your time.” His hand was trembling as he pressed the OFF button on the cell phone.

  It was madness!

  His entire sense of who he was—could it be a phantasm? Was that possible? He shuttered his eyes briefly and allowed the countless memories of his four decades to surge and spill and swirl in his mind, yielding to a free and unstructured flood of association. There were memories beyond counting, and they were the memories of Hal Ambler, unless he truly was mad. The time, exploring his own backyard as a young child, that he stumbled on a subterranean nest of yellow jackets—how they spurted from the ground, like a black and yellow geyser!—and he wound up in the emergency room with thirty stings. The hot July in summer camp, learning to do the butterfly stroke in Lake Candaiga, and catching a glimpse of breast when one of the camp counselors, Wendy Sullivan, was changing in a Portosan with a broken door. The August he spent, age fifteen, working in the barbecue restaurant of a fairground ten miles south of Camden, Delaware, learning to ask customers, “Would you like some of our fresh corn on the cob with that?” when they’d only asked for the plate of spare ribs and mashed potatoes. His earnest after-work conversations with frizzy-haired Julianne Daiches, who was stationed at the Frialator, about the difference between heavy petting and light. There were less comfortable memories as well, some having to do with his father’s departure, when he was six, and the weakness both his parents had for the solace of the bottle. He remembered an all-night poker game he’d played during his freshman year—how the upperclassmen, especially, grew uneasy with his steadily growing pile of chips, as if he had found some undetectable method of cheating. He remembered, too, a sophomore-year crush at Carlyle—God, the breathlessness of their early encounters, and then the tears, the stormy recriminations and reconciliations, the lemon-verbena fragrance of her shampoo, which had seemed so exotic and which, for years afterward, could still leave him stricken with nostalgia and yearning.

  He remembered his recruitment and training at Consular Operations, his trainers’ growing fascination with his peculiar gift. His cover job at the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, as a cultural exchange officer, someone who was regularly stationed abroad. All these things he remembered with clarity and precision. His had been a double life. Or was it simply a double delusion? A throbbing was building in his head as he left his room.

  In a corner of what passed for the motel’s lobby, an Internet-enabled computer was available, as a minor amenity for guests. Ambler sat down in front of it and, using a pass code held by the State Department’s analytic bureau, logged on to the newspaper database LexisNexis. The local newspaper at Camden, where Ambler grew up, once ran a small item about him when, as a sixth grader, he won the county spelling bee. Enthalpy. Dithyramb. Hellebore. Ambler spelled them all, fluently and correctly, establishing himself as the best speller not only in Simpson Elementary School but in Kent County. When he made a mistake, he always knew it immediately—knew it from the judge’s expression. His mother—who was by then raising him by herself—had been inordinately pleased, he recalled. But more than a child’s egotism was involved now.

  He ran the Nexis search.

  Nothing. Nothing matched the description. He remembered the Dover Post item so clearly—remembered how his mother cut it out and kept it on the refrigerator door with a magnet designed to resemble a slice of watermelon. Kept it there until it yellowed and started to crumble from the light. Decades’ worth of the Dover Post was on LexisNexis, an archive of all sorts of local news, about who won and who lost in the city council elections, about layoffs at the Seabury Hosier Company, about capital renovations at city hall. But as far as Nexis was concerned, Harrison Ambler did not exist. He did not exist then. He did not exist now.

  Insanity!

  The airport was the familiar jungle of terrazzo, steel, and glass, with the familiar air of a fully staffed facility. Wherever one turned, one saw airline employees, airport security officers, and baggage handlers, all wearing badges and uniforms of various sorts. The milieu, Ambler decided, was a cross between a federal mail-handling facility and a resort town.

  He bought a ticket to Wilmington, one-way, a hundred and fifty dollars: the cover charge, so to speak, of the rendezvous. He looked as bored as the woman at the ticket counter, who stifled a yawn as she stamped his boarding card. The photo ID he submitted—the Georgia license, altered to display a photograph of its current bearer—would not withstand close scrutiny, but it received none.

  Gate D14 was at the very end of a long walkway and adjoined two others in a radial array. He glanced around; fewer than a dozen travelers were visible. It was half past two. The next flight at any of these gates would not be for another ninety minutes. Within half an hour, more people would arrive for a flight to Pittsburgh, but for the moment it was, indeed, a dead period.

  Had the person he was to meet already arrived? That seemed likely. But who was it? You’ll know who I am, the message had said.

  Ambler walked around the various seating areas, taking in the stragglers and early birds. The plump woman feeding candy to her plump daughter; the man in the ill-fitting suit, thumbing through a PowerPoint presentation; the young woman with piercings and jeans she had marked up with different-colored felt tip pens—none of them were contenders. Ambler’s sense of frustration began to mount. You’ll know who I am.

  Finally, his eyes alighted on someone who was seated by himself, near a window.

  It was a turbaned Sikh gentleman, moving h
is lips as he read USA Today. As Ambler walked over to him, he noticed that there was no evidence of any hair underneath the turban—not a single stray strand could be seen. A faint gleam of adhesive on the man’s cheek suggested that the full beard was recently applied. Was the man really moving his lips as he read, or was he communicating on a fiber-optic microphone?

  To anyone else, the man would have seemed perfectly settled, bored, and still. To Ambler, he seemed anything but. On instinct, Ambler swiveled and stepped behind the seated figure. Now, with a lightning-swift movement, he grabbed the man’s turban and lifted it up. Beneath it, he saw the man’s pale, smooth-shaven pate—and, taped to it with a fabric bandage, a small Glock.

  The gun was in Ambler’s hand now, and he let the turban drop back into place. The seated man remained stock-still, with the tactical immobility and silence of a highly trained professional who knew when the prudent response was not to respond. Only his raised eyebrows registered surprise. The whole soundless maneuver had taken no more than two seconds and had been concealed from anyone’s view by Ambler’s own body.

  The pistol was oddly light in his hand, and he recognized the model at once. The body was made of plastic and ceramic; the slide contained less metal than was found in a typical belt buckle. The odds that it would set off a metal detector were low; the odds that the security guards would interfere with a Sikh’s religious headdress were even lower. A tube of bronzer and a yard of muslin cloth: a cheap, efficient costume. Once again, the skill and efficiency of the rendezvous inspired both admiration and anxiety.

  “Bravo,” the fake Sikh said in a low voice, a faint smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “A fine defensive move. Not that it changes anything.” He spoke English with the perfectly enunciated consonants of someone who had received instruction in it abroad, albeit from an early age.

  “I’m the one with the weapon. That doesn’t change anything? In my experience it does.”