The Ambler Warning

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m talking about James Jesus Angleton, and one of his legacy’s many victims.”

  “Who, goddammit?”

  “Maybe you.”

  It was not the fitness center, then. Joe Li had checked the area carefully, including the locker room. It was remarkable how little attention he attracted; it was as if he had donned some magic invisibility garment when he put on the janitor’s coveralls. Now he had pushed his bucket through the locker rooms of the swimming pool. No sign of his quarry. The last place to look was the pool itself. Indeed, it had distinct advantages as a meeting site.

  Walking with the shambling gait he had adopted for the role, Joe Li made his way into the area of the swimming pool. Nobody had given him a second look; nobody had given the long handle of the squeeze mop a second look, either. The fact that its diameter was too great for its ostensible job was too complicated a thought to have presented itself to anyone’s consciousness. As Joe Li wheeled his bucket assembly along the floor of small ceramic tiles, he casually glanced around him. The man he was after had narrowly evaded him in the Sourlands. It would not happen twice.

  If his quarry was here, his work would soon be finished.

  Ambler closed his eyes and dived to the floor of the pool, then let himself ascend quickly. He needed a break. Angleton, the CIA’s great mastermind of Cold War counterespionage, was a genius whose paranoid obsessions almost destroyed the agency he served.

  “There weren’t many pies that Angleton didn’t have a finger in,” Osiris went on. “Upshot is that when the Church Committee is starting up and the CIA has to mothball MKULTRA, in the early seventies, Angleton makes sure the program wasn’t shut down. It really just migrates to the Pentagon. Soon Angleton is on the outs, but his true believers keep the faith. Year after year, they’re spending millions on research, inside and outside the government. They’ve got scientists in pharmaceutical firms and academic labs on retainer. And they’re doing their own work, without any bullshit from some bioethics committee. Working with scopolamine, bufotenine, corynanthine. Uppers and downers and in-betweeners. They’re developing modified versions of the old Wilcox-Reiter machines, for electro-convulsive therapy. Building on breakthroughs in the area of ‘depatterning,’ where you’d mess with someone’s mind so hard that they started to lose all sense of space and time, all their usual neural patterns, basically their sense of self. You’d combine that with a technique they called ‘psychic driving,’ where they’d put a patient in a stupor and bombard him with messages on a tape loop—sixteen hours a day for weeks on end. All very crude in those days. But Angleton thought there was a practical application for it. He was obsessed with Sov mind-control techniques, naturally. He knew that our agents could be, had been, captured by the enemy, the contents of their minds plumbed by means of stress, trauma, and psychopharmacology. But what if you could alter the contents of human memory?”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Angleton didn’t think so. The call was to adapt the old research on depatterning and psychic driving, and bring it to a whole new level. Now we’re in the Pentagon’s Strategic Neuropsychology Division, where they developed a technique known as mnemonic overlay. Forget about the old tape loops. We’re way beyond that now. It involved ‘rich feed’—video, audio, olfactory stimuli—and the manufacture of hundreds of discrete memory vignettes. Subjects would be put under the influence of all sorts of infused psychotomimetic chemicals, and then exposed to the feed, a stream of vivid episodes, presented in jumbled, constantly changing order, from defecating, as a toddler, on a plastic potty to heavy petting with a thirteen-year-old girl next door . . . a high-school graduation scene . . . a college keg party . . . . A name, that of the overlaid identity, would be repeated again and again. The result was an alternate self that an agent would, automatically, retreat to under conditions of extreme stress or altered consciousness. The idea was that you’d produce an interrogation-proof agent. But you know how the clandestine services work. Once you’ve developed a technique, it’s anyone’s guess how they’ll put it to use.”

  “And you’re suggesting . . .”

  “Yeah,” said the sightless operative. “I’m suggesting. Not stating like I know, because I don’t. I’m just putting it to you. What makes most sense of what you know?”

  Ambler was beginning to feel prickly heat, despite the cool water. Identity fragmentation . . . abreactive ego dystonia . . . the psychiatric jargon returned to him in sharp, lacerating shards.

  Madness!

  Trying to affirm the immediacy of his senses—to anchor himself in the real—he felt the chill of the water around him, the ache in his muscles. He craned his head, taking in all the tiny particulars of his surroundings. The old lady swimming her short, side-to-side laps, she had to be eighty. The girl—she had to be her granddaughter—in the lacy red suit. The plump coffee drinkers seated on poolside chaise lounges, in their modest one-piece outfits, no doubt discussing diets and exercise routines. On the other side of the tiled deck, a stooped custodian with a bucket and mop. Chinese guy, indeterminate age . . . except there was something off, wasn’t there?

  Ambler blinked. The stoop was not quite convincing—and, as he studied the scene before him, neither was the mop.

  Oh Christ!

  Was he hallucinating? Succumbing to paranoid delusions?

  No—he could not allow himself to think like that.

  “Osiris,” Ambler said suddenly. “There’s a janitor. Chinese. One of yours?”

  “Not remotely possible,” Osiris said. “This was a spur-of-the-moment decision, coming here. Nobody was notified.”

  “There’s something odd about him. Something . . . I just don’t know. But we can’t stay here.” Ambler dived underwater, intending to resurface a few yards away, so that he could take another look at the janitor without being obvious about it. Ambler couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong about that man.

  Moments later, the water nearby had grown clouded, dark.

  On instinct, Ambler stopped himself from resurfacing, dived deep into the pool before looking up.

  Blood was gouting from Osiris’s body—the speed and pressure indicating that a bullet must have severed a carotid artery—and it spread through the chlorinated water like billowing clouds.

  Kevin McConnelly was trying to be patient with the middle-aged blowhard in what the Plaza insisted on calling the changing area. Locker room was too low-class, McConnelly guessed. Locker room said athlete’s foot and jockstraps; the Plaza was all about cosseted rich people who liked to think the world was designed just for them, as if some Savile Row tailor had taken his scissors and pins over the whole goddamn Western Hemisphere and nipped and tucked everything to their liking. Is Cincinnati in the way, sir? We’ll move it. Lake Michigan not big enough? We’ll let it out some more, sir. That was how they talked. That was how they thought. And if there was any bubble on the planet where they could indulge the fantasy, it had to be the Plaza Hotel.

  “Not at all,” McConnelly told the blowhard, a red-faced man with no neck. “If you think someone stole your wallet, we have to take that seriously. All I’m saying is that we’ve very seldom had a problem with property theft in the changing area.”

  “Always a first, though,” the red-faced man grumbled.

  “Did you check your jacket pocket?” McConnelly asked, gesturing toward the lump in the lower left pocket of the man’s navy blazer.

  The man glowered but patted the pocket. Then he pulled out the wallet and actually opened it up, as if to verify that it was really his.

  Like whose wallet were you expecting to find, you fat fuck? McConnelly refrained from smiling; it might have been taken the wrong way. “All right, then,” he said.

  “I never keep my wallet here,” the man said petulantly. “Strange.” He gave McConnelly a suspicious look, as if McConnelly were the culprit. As if it were his idea of a goof. A slash-like smile: “Sorry to waste your time
, then.” But the tone somehow said that Mc-Connelly was to blame.

  A real class act. McConnelly just shrugged. “No worries. Happens a lot.” Especially with arrogant bastards like you who won’t admit when you screw up. This was one problem he never had to deal with when he was an MP. Military police dealt with people who had no need to establish their place. Their place was specified precisely on their shoulder board.

  He was about to fetch a clipboard and file an “incident” report—except that they should be called non-incident reports, since most of the time that’s all they were, complaints without a cause—when he heard screams coming from the pool area.

  Another bullet pierced the water, trailing a shaft of bubbles like a string of pearl beads, missing Ambler by just a few feet. The index of refraction had put the gunman off his target. But he would not make the same mistake again. What was the angle of fire—how far was the “janitor” from the side of the pool? Staying well below the surface, pulling himself with powerful strokes of his arms and legs, Ambler raced to the side nearest the gunman: closer was actually safer. The gunman would have to reposition himself to have an angle on Ambler now.

  Ambler glanced toward the red-billowing mass in the center of the deep end: Osiris was already dead, he could see, hovering near the surface with his limbs spread out.

  Oh dear Christ no!

  Where was safety? Ambler had been underwater for perhaps fifteen seconds. He could hold his breath for perhaps fifty or sixty seconds. In the crystalline blue water, there was no place to hide. Except—the blood, the hemorrhaging cloud a few yards away . . . Osiris’s own lifeless body offered the only protection he had. It would hardly last long, and Ambler, clad only in the hotel-provided swimming trunks, was utterly vulnerable. He shot to the surface, along the side of the pool nearest the assailant, and took a few deep breaths, opening his mouth wide to minimize the sound. The air was filled with shrieks. The others in the pool and on the tiled deck were screaming and fleeing. Hotel security would soon arrive, but it would be too late for Ambler, and besides, he suspected they would be no match for the Chinese gunman.

  Without protection—that wasn’t quite right, was it? The water itself was a kind of armor. Fourteen feet ofit at the deep end. Water was a thousand times as dense as air, producing a thousand times as much drag as air. Bullets could travel no more than a few feet in it without losing speed and direction.

  He dived deep and when he moved toward the surface he hid himself in the spreading cloud of blood beneath the lifeless operative. Then he dragged the body toward the diving boards. Another shot zipped into the water, missing Ambler’s shoulder by a few inches. A rifle that could be easily disassembled and reassembled, and whose barrel could pass as a mop, was a compromised weapon. Most likely, it was of a stripped-down single-bolt design that had to be reloaded before each shot. Hence the four- or five-second lag between bullets.

  Through the bloodied water, he glimpsed the high-diving board, now overhead. The concrete stanchion that supported it would provide some protection.

  The Chinese man was holding the long, dowel-like rifle with its stock to his cheek. It looked to be a narrow-bore weapon, perhaps modified from an AMT Lightning, one of those folding-stock models designed for stealth sniping.

  Another crack as he squeezed off a bullet; Ambler, who could tell that he was about to squeeze the trigger moments before he did so, had thrashed violently to reposition himself and evade its path. Now he plunged deep into the water again.

  Timing was all. It would be another five or six seconds before he could fire again. Could Ambler make it to the concrete stanchion in time? And if he did, what would he do next?

  Yet there was no time to plan. He had to live in the moment or he would die in the moment. He had no choice. Now!

  Not pain screams, Kevin McConnelly decided, panic screams. He was slouchy and out of shape—the mirror never lied—but the fifteen years he had spent as an MP gave him survival instincts. He ducked his head into Le Centre Nautique, as the sign pretentiously called the swimming-pool area, and then stepped back. What he had seen was a professional, firing from an oddlooking paramilitary rifle; he knew this was not someone to take on with a handgun. He charged into the locker area and looked around desperately. He was sweating, his stomach furled, and he remembered why he had left the military police. Still, something had to be done, and he would have to do it.

  Something. But what?

  He did not consider himself much of a brain, but the next thing he did, he decided later, was very, very smart. He found the circuit breaker for the hall and turned off all the lights. An inky darkness shrouded everything, and a curious silence, too, as fans and motors stopped running, the kind one wasn’t aware of until they cut out. He realized that it might help the gunman to escape, but that was not his main problem. He had to stop the shooting. Nobody went shooting in the dark, did they? Now, there had to be a flashlight around somewhere.

  He heard the sound of someone streaking toward him. He stuck out a leg and tripped the man.

  The runner crashed into a stand of lockers. As Mc-Connelly turned the lights on again, he saw a six-foot-tall man in swim trunks. Short brown hair, a smoothly muscled body—late thirties, early forties, the sort of age where, if someone had kept in shape, it was hard to say.

  “What the hell’d you do that for?” The man glared as he massaged a bruised shoulder.

  Not the shooter. The shot-at, more likely.

  McConnelly took a quick look around; no sign of the gunman. No sign of the gun.

  The bad guy had fled the scene: they both knew it. McConnelly, anyway, was relieved.

  “Here’s the deal.” McConnelly liked to say those words. It was the voice of authority, and it was amazing how persuasive it was even to the real mucketymucks. “I’m going to get the police to come right now and secure the area. Then you’re going to explain to me and to them exactly what went down.” He stood with his hands on his hips, spreading open his sports jacket and exposing his belt holster.

  “Is that what you think?” The man went straight to his locker, where he scrubbed at his head with a towel and started to change into his street clothes.

  “That’s what I know,” McConnelly said levelly, following him.

  Then a curious thing happened; the man caught a glimpse of himself in the wall-mounted mirror and suddenly blanched, like he’d seen a ghost. After a moment, the man turned away and took a deep breath.

  “Call one of the tabloids,” the man said harshly. “I’d like to tell them about what happened. ‘Plaza Pool Shoot-out’—the headline practically writes itself.”

  “That’s not necessary,” McConnelly said, with a sinking feeling. What had happened was not something he looked forward to explaining to the hotel management. In fact, it was more than his job was worth. And they would probably blame him for it, same as that red-faced asshole, and with as much logic.

  “How come you get to decide what’s necessary?”

  “I’m just saying that we can have a police investigation without a lot of distracting publicity.”

  “I think the tabloids can do better. Maybe ‘Plaza Pool of Blood.’ ”

  “It’s real important that you stay here,” McConnelly said. But he did not say it as if he meant it, because deep down he didn’t.

  “Here’s the deal,” the man said over his shoulder as he walked away. “You never saw me.”

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  Caston was staring unhappily at a list of State Department civilian covers.

  The trouble, of course, was that it almost certainly did not contain the name he was after. That name had been deleted. How was he supposed to find something that did not exist?

  His eyes drifted over to that morning’s Financial Times, which reposed in the wastepaper basket by his desk. It went to show how damned distracted he was that, for the first time he could remember, he made a mistake in filling out the crossword puzzle. Nothing important; thrice before the transport begins wa
s the clue. He’d written down trivia and he had to erase it; trifle was plainly the right answer. He pulled the furled newspaper out of the bin and glared at the puzzle. Tiny eraser crumbs still adhered to the page.

  Caston dropped the paper, but the cogs in his head were starting to turn. To erase was to take something away. But when we did so, didn’t we always end up adding something, too?

  “Adrian,” he called out.

  “Master,” Adrian said, bowing his head with lighthearted irony. If it were less affectionate, it would be just shy of insubordination.

  “Prepare a Requisition 1133A, would you?”

  Adrian pursed his lips. “That’s, like, an iron-mountain search, right? For offline archival retrieval.”

  “Very good, Adrian.” The young man had been doing his homework.

  “The clerks hate like hell to do those. A major pain in the ass.”

  Which was no doubt why they always took an inordinately long time. To Adrian, Caston was glacial: “Is that what the manual says?”

  Adrian Choi colored. “I know somebody who works there.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “Just some girl,” Adrian mumbled, regretting that he had said anything about it.

  “Girl, meaning a female of your approximate generation?”

  “I guess so,” Adrian said, his eyes downcast.

  “Well, Adrian, I really am in a great hurry for my Requisition 1133A.”

  “OK.”

  “Would you call me a charming man?”

  Adrian gave him a doe-frozen-in-the-headlights look. “Um, no?” he finally said, obviously having realized he could not say yes and maintain a straight face.

  “Correct, Adrian. I am happy to know that you haven’t lost touch with reality. The advantage of being a newcomer. Someone here once described me, accurately, as having a ‘charm deficit,’ and that was someone who actually liked me. Now, I have very careful instructions for you. I want you to call your young friend in Archives and”—he cleared his throat—“charm the panties off the little heifer. Can you manage that?”