“So you promptly made your way there and kept a vigil on the bench across the street.”
“Because the information you needed had to involve Consular Operations in some way, and the world of Consular Operations was the one you were most at home with.”
“So it was just a feeling you had, huh?”
Caston’s eyes flashed. “A ‘feeling’?” He was majestic in his scorn. “A ‘feeling’? Clay Caston does not proceed by feelings. He does not traffic in hunches or intuitions or instincts or—”
“You want to keep your voice down?”
“Sorry.” Caston flushed. “I’m afraid you touched a nerve.”
“Anyway, by your wonderful succession of logical inferences—”
“Well, it’s more a matter of a probabilistic matrix than strict syllogistic logic—”
“By whatever screwy juju you rely upon, you decided to stake out one particular doorway. And you got lucky.”
“Lucky? Obviously you haven’t heard anything I’ve said. It was a matter of applying Bayes’ Theorem to estimate the conditional probabilities, giving due weight to the prior probabilities and thus avoiding the fallacy of—”
“But the harder question is why. Why were you looking for me?”
“A lot of people are looking for you. I can only answer for myself.” Caston paused. “And that’s hard enough. A few days ago, all I was interested in was finding you so that you could be put out of business—an irregularity eliminated. But now, I’ve come to think that there’s a larger irregularity to contend with. I’m in possession of certain data points. I believe you are in possession of a somewhat different set of data points. By pooling the information—establishing a larger sample space, to use the technical term—we may be able to make progress.”
“I still don’t understand why you aren’t in your office sharpening pencils.”
Caston snorted. “I was being stonewalled is what it comes down to. There are some bad actors who want to find you. I want to find them. That might give us a shared interest.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” Ambler said. He kept his voice quiet and conversational, knowing it would be lost in the general hubbub at any distance greater than three feet. His eyes continued to scan his surroundings. “You wanted to track me down to take me out. Now you want to track down others who want to track me down.”
“Exactly.”
“Then what?”
“Then? Well, then it will be your turn. After I turn them in, I’ll want to turn you in. After that, it’s back to sharpening those Number Two pencils.”
“You’re telling me that eventually you hope to ‘turn me in’? Put me ‘out of business’? Why would you tell me a thing like that?”
“Because it’s the truth. See, you represent everything I detest.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere.”
“Fact is, people like you are a blight. You’re a cowboy, and you’re deployed by other cowboys, by people who have no consideration for rules and regs, people who will take the shortcut every time. But that’s not all I know about you. I also know that you pretty much always know when someone is lying to you. So why should I bother?”
“What you heard is right. It doesn’t spook you?”
“Makes life easier, the way I figure. Prevarication was never my strong suit.”
“Let me ask you something one more time: Have you told anyone where I am?”
“No,” Caston replied.
“Then tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.”
“Because it’s like I said. In the short run, we have certain shared interests. In the long run—well, as Keynes said, in the long run we’re all dead. I figure you’ll take your chances on a temporary alliance.”
“The enemy of your enemy is your friend?”
“Christ, no,” Caston said. “That’s hateful philosophy.” He started to fold up the paper wrappings into an origami crane. “Let’s be clear. You’re not my friend. And I’m sure as hell not yours.”
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Ethan Zackheim gazed at the faces of the analysts and technical specialists assembled around the table at conference room 0002A and idly wondered how many tons of stone and concrete lay above him—six stories of 1961-era construction, the hulking mass of 2201 C Street. Just now, the weight on his own shoulders felt oppressive enough.
“All right, people, we obviously haven’t achieved our objectives, so please tell me that we’ve at least learned a thing or two. Abigail?”
“Well, we’ve analyzed his consulate downloads,” said the signals-intelligence specialist, her eyes darting uneasily beneath her brown bangs. Tarquin’s penetration of a supposedly secure data facility in Paris remained a sore spot among them—a coup both stunning and mortifying, and the occasion for recriminations in all directions—and that was not a discussion any of them wanted to revive. “Three of his searches were for info pertaining to Wai-Chan Leung, Kurt Sollinger, and Benoit Deschesnes.”
“His victims,” grunted Matthew Wexler. As a twenty-year veteran of the State Department’s Intelligence and Research Bureau, the INR, the policy analyst claimed the prerogative to interject freely. “The criminal revisiting his crimes.”
Zackheim loosened his tie. Is it hot in here or is it just me? he wondered but decided not to ask it out loud. He had a feeling it was just him. “What sense does that make?”
“It makes the connection between him and these victims pretty damn clear if it wasn’t already.” Wexler leaned forward, his round belly pressed against the table. “I mean, we had strong circumstantial evidence before, but now there can’t be any doubt at all.”
“I don’t think the image analysis can be dismissed as circumstantial,” Randall Denning, the imaging expert, said quietly, as if only to put his demurral on the record. His blue blazer sagged around his slight frame. “It places him at the scene. Definitively.”
“Matthew, you’re proceeding under the assumption that we all agreed to make,” said Zackheim. “But something about these downloads gives me pause. Why would someone be investigating the backgrounds of the people he killed? I mean, isn’t that the kind of thing a guy does before taking someone out?”
At the opposite end of the table, Franklin Runciman, the deputy director of Consular Operations, looked uneasy with the direction Zackheim was taking. He cleared his throat. “Ethan, you’re right that there are multiple interpretations available to us.” His eyes seemed especially piercing beneath his heavy brow. “There always are. But we can’t pursue multiple courses of action. We have to pick one, based on our best read of the evidence—all the evidence. We don’t have time to entertain counterfactuals.”
Zackheim clenched his jaw. Runciman’s question-begging summary exasperated him: what was factual and what was contrary to fact was exactly the issue to be resolved. But it was pointless to remonstrate. Runciman was correct, anyway, that multiple interpretations were possible. Still, Abigail’s findings disturbed Zackheim for reasons he found difficult to articulate. Tarquin, whoever he was, appeared to be doing what they were doing—he was acting as if he was conducting an investigation, not as if he was the target of an investigation. Zackheim swallowed hard. It didn’t sit well with him.
“The real kick-in-the-pants is Fenton,” Wexler said. Zackheim noticed that the analyst had not remembered to button his button-down collar. Given Wexler’s brilliantly well-organized mind, of course, nobody cared about his personal dishabille.
“It’s a definite ID,” Denning put in. “That’s the man accompanying Tarquin in the immediate arena of the Sollinger assassination. Paul Fenton.”
“Nobody’s disputing that,” Wexler said, as if speaking to a slow student. “We know he was there. Question is what that signifies.” He turned to the others. “What’s the latest on that?”
“There have been some clearance issues here,” Abigail said in a gingerly tone.
“Clearance issues?” Zackheim was incredulous. “What are we, the editorial boar
d of The Washington Post? There shouldn’t be any internal impediments here. Clearance? That’s bullshit!” He turned to Wexler. “What about you—you pick over Fenton’s files here?”
Wexler turned his beefy palms up. “Sequestered,” he said. “The special-access protocol is inviolate, it seems.” His eyes darted toward Runciman.
“Explain.” Zackheim spoke directly to Runciman. Bureaucratic logic told him that the deputy director of Consular Operations had either acquiesced to the barriers or actively implemented them.
“It’s not relevant to the purposes of this team,” Runciman said, unfazed. Even under the cheap fluorescent lights, his dark suit—some sort of charcoal flannel with a subdued pattern—looked sleek and expensive.
“Not relevant?” Zackheim was almost spluttering. “Isn’t that something for the team to decide? Dammit, Frank! You asked me to spearhead this thing, we’ve got all your aces here from Imaging, Sig-intel, Analysis—and you’re not going to let us do our jobs?”
Runciman’s rugged features betrayed not a trace of tension, but his eyes bore down on Zackheim. “We’ve moved past the fact-finding part of the assignment. Now the job is to execute the mission we agreed on. Not to convene a bull session, not to speculate about hypotheticals, not to do archival research or indulge your idle curiosity. When a mission is established, your job is to make sure it succeeds. To provide operational support and actionable intelligence to our deputized agents so they can do what we’ve tasked them to do.”
“But the picture we’re getting—”
“The picture?” Runciman cut him off, with undisguised scorn. “Our job, Ethan, is to take the bastard out of the picture.”
PARIS
Half an hour later, the two men, operative and auditor, arrived separately at the hotel where Caston was staying, a curious, cramped place called the Hotel Sturbridge, part of an American-based chain. Caston was obviously trying to insulate himself from the local environs as much as possible, and his room was large, by Parisian standards, albeit boxy and institutional in feel. It could have been a hotel in Fort Worth. Caston invited Ambler to sit on a cabriole-legged armchair, upholstered in mustard velveteen, as Caston set about arraying papers on a small, glossily veneered desk, the sort of object that proclaimed its cheapness by its failed attempt to look posh.
Caston asked Ambler a few dry, pointed questions about experiences since leaving Parrish Island; Ambler’s responses were equally matter-of-fact.
“A bizarre . . . condition,” Caston said after a while. “Yours, I mean. This whole erasure thing. If I weren’t in the bottom decile for empathy, I’d have to think that the experience would be kind of unsettling. It’s like some strange identity crisis or whatnot.”
“An identity crisis?” Ambler scoffed. “Please. That’s when a software engineer holes up in a small adobe house in New Mexico and reads a lot of Carlos Castaneda. That’s when a Fortune 500 marketing exec decides to quit his job and start a business selling vegan muffins to organic food stores. We’re way beyond that—can we agree on this?”
Caston gave a half-apologetic shrug. “Listen, I’ve spent the past few days assembling all the data points I could, with the help of my assistant. I’ve retrieved a good deal of your performance record at the Political Stabilization Unit, or, anyway, what purports to be a performance record.” He handed a stapled sheaf of pages to Ambler.
Ambler thumbed through it. It was a curious sensation, to see, in a desiccated and abbreviated form, the product of blood, sweat, and tears. It filled him with a sense of bleakness. His career, like that of so many others, was one devoid of any public profile; its utter obscurity was to be redeemed by the covert heroism of his actions. That was the promise, the covenant: Your deeds, albeit hidden, may change history. You will be history’s hidden hand.
But what if that was all an illusion? What if a life of obscurity—a life that had forced him to sacrifice the close human ties that gave meaning to so many lives—was without any real and enduring consequences, or at least any good ones?
Caston caught his gaze. “Focus, OK? You see anything that looks faked, you let me know.”
Ambler nodded.
“So a profile emerges: you’ve got an extraordinary facility at ‘affective inference.’ A walking polygraph. Gives you a lot of value in the field. The Stab team snaps you up early on in your Cons Ops career. You’re in the rough-and-tumble. Engaged in the kind of assignments that the unit likes to get up to.” He was not trying to hide his distaste. “Then we’ve got the job at Changhua. Successfully completed, according to the files. Next thing, you drop off the map. Why? What happened?”
Ambler told him briskly, keeping his eyes on Caston’s face all the while.
Caston didn’t speak immediately, but after a while, his gaze sharpened. “Tell me exactly what happened the evening when you were taken away. Everything you said, everything that was said. Everything—and everyone—you remember seeing.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t . . .” His voice trailed off. “It just isn’t there. Laurel says it’s something to do with drug-induced retrograde amnesia.”
“It has to be in your head somewhere,” Caston said. “Doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Ambler said. “There’s my life, and then it sort of rags off into nothing for a while.”
“A lost weekend.”
“To another order of magnitude.”
“Maybe you’re not trying hard enough,” Caston growled.
“Dammit, Caston. I lost two years of my life. Two years of mind games. Two years of desolation. Two years of hopelessness.”
Caston blinked. “That’s six years.”
“If you ever get to thinking about entering the helping professions, Caston, don’t. You have no idea what I’ve been through—”
“Neither do you. That’s what I’m trying to find out, right? So save your whining for somebody who’ll pretend to give a damn.”
“You don’t get it. I cast my mind back then, and there’s nothing, OK? Nothing but fuzz on the screen. No picture.” A wave of exhaustion swept over him. He was tired. Too tired to talk. Too tired to think.
He walked over to the bed and lay down, staring miserably at the ceiling.
Caston snorted. “Screw the picture. Start with the small facts. How did you get back from Taiwan?”
“No idea.”
“What means of conveyance?”
“Goddammit, I told you I don’t know,” Ambler exploded.
Caston was undeterred, seemingly blind to Ambler’s emotions, to the agony caused by his proddings. “Did you swim? Take a steamer?”
The operative’s head was pounding; he struggled to control himself, to moderate his breathing. “Fuck you,” he said, more quietly. “Did you hear a word I said?”
“What means of conveyance?” Caston repeated. There was no tenderness in his voice, only impatience.
“Obviously, I must have flown.”
“So you do have some idea, you self-pitying bastard. Where would you have flown from, exactly?”
Ambler shrugged. “I guess Chiang Kai-shek Airport, outside Taipei.”
“What flight?”
“I don’t . . .” He blinked. “Cathay Pacific,” he heard himself say.
“A commercial flight, then.” Caston evinced no surprise. “A commercial flight. Twelve hours. You have a drink on board?”
“Must have.”
“What would you have had?”
“A Wild Turkey, I guess.”
Caston picked up the telephone and dialed room service. Five minutes later, a bottle of Wild Turkey arrived at the door.
He poured a couple of fingers into a tumbler, handed it to Ambler. “Relax, have a drink,” the auditor said stiffly. His brows were knit darkly, and the offer was an order: the auditor had turned into the bartender from hell.
“I don’t drink,” Ambler protested.
“Since when?”
“Since . . .” Ambler faltered.
“Si
nce Parrish Island. You used to drink, though, and you’re going to drink now. Bottoms up!”
“What’s this about?”
“A science experiment. Just do it.”
Ambler drank, the bourbon burning slightly as it went down his gullet. He felt no euphoria, only a sense of dizziness, confusion, a growing queasiness.
Caston poured him another drink, and Ambler downed it.
“What time did the plane get in?” the auditor demanded. “Evening arrival or morning?”
“Morning arrival.” An eel of unease squirmed in his bowels. Knowledge was coming to him, as if from another dimension. It was not at his beck and call; he could not summon it. Yet it had been summoned, and it had appeared.
“Did you do a debrief with the operation’s OIC?”
Ambler felt frozen. He must have done one.
“Next question,” Caston asked relentlessly. It was as if he was proceeding through a vast inventory of tiny questions, like a bird pecking away at a cliff. “Who’s Transience?”
Ambler felt as if the room was spinning around him, and when he shut his eyes, the room spun faster still. For a long time he was silent. Like a gunshot in the Alps, the question triggered a small cascade that turned into an avalanche. Blackness overcame him.
And then, out of the blackness, a glimmering.
TWENTY-THREE
Once more, he was in Changhua. A past that shadowed his present. In a frenetic blur of images, he grew aware of a whirlwind of activity, a rampage through the island. He had found what he had feared.
Then, a series of fleeting, aleatory pictures. The flight attendant on the Cathay Pacific flight, a geisha of the airways; another bourbon was a hand gesture away, and she kept him well supplied. The taxi driver at Dulles, a Trinidadian with sunken cheeks and strong views about the quickest route. Ambler’s apartment, at Baskerton Towers, which seemed, that day, so small, so sterile. Little more than a place to bathe and dress and prepare himself, so it seemed, for battle.