The Ambler Warning

  Ambler whispered further instructions in Caston’s ear.

  Finally, Caston took another deep breath. “Let me speak to your commanding officer,” he roared. At a normal, conversational volume, his voice might have trembled; forced to shout, however, he sounded bold and authoritative.

  No response came.

  Arranging his countenance into a look of sheer terror, Ambler hurtled himself toward the ravaged door, as if he had been shoved, Caston concealed behind him. “Don’t let him kill me,” he whimpered, pressing his face into the large, jagged hole. “Please don’t let him kill me. Please don’t let him kill me.” His eyes were wide, staring, darting wildly with the hysteria of a civilian caught in a nightmare beyond his imagining.

  He saw the same two commandos as before: squarejawed, dark-haired, muscular men, obviously highly trained. They were trying to look past him, into the darkened room, oblivious of the fact that their quarry was, literally, staring them in the face.

  “I want to speak to the commanding officer,” Caston repeated in a loud, confident voice. “Now.”

  The two men exchanged glances, and Ambler felt his pulse quicken. There was no commanding officer present. Not yet. The two gunmen were alone. Rapid response came at the expense of team staffing. No doubt others would arrive shortly, but for the moment, the duo was operating without backup.

  “Please don’t let him kill me,” Ambler repeated, in a sniveling mantra of terror.

  “You’re going to be OK,” one of the commandos, the larger of the two, said in a low voice.

  “Let the hostage go,” the other commando shouted. “And we’ll talk.”

  “Do you think I’m a moron?” Caston immediately shouted. Ambler was astonished: the auditor was extemporizing.

  “If you hurt him, it’s all over for you,” the second commando yelled back. Hostage negotiations would have been covered in the operative’s early training, but cursorily. He was obviously trying to remember the basic tactics.

  Suddenly Ambler sank to his knees, out of the commandos’ view. “Ow!” he bellowed, as if he had just been struck.

  Now he and Caston conferred quietly, hurriedly. What followed had to be flawlessly executed. Precision was something Caston valued; his look of intense concentration showed that he would honor it even now, even here.

  Once more, Ambler showed his face through the jagged hole, his head jerking forward as if being prodded with a gun. “Please let me out of here,” he wailed. “I don’t know who you people are. I don’t want to know. Just don’t let him kill me.” He contorted his features into a place beyond terror and let his eyes become moist. “He has a really long rifle with lots of bullets. He says he’ll blow me to shreds. I got a wife, kids. I’m an American.” He was jabbering, speaking in short, breathless sentences, a picture of panic. “You guys like movies? I’m in the movie business. I came here to scout locations. Plus the ambassador’s a real good friend. And then this guy told me . . . he told me, oh Christ oh Christ—”

  “Here’s the plan,” Caston boomed, unseen in the darkened room. “One of you can come to within five feet of the threshold. A foot nearer, and he dies. I’m going to let the civilian walk toward you so you can see that he’s fine. But I’ll have a red-bead on him all the time, understand? You make a wrong move, and my .338 Lapua Magnum gets to show you what it can do.”

  Ambler flung open the door and, walking stiffly and unsteadily, took a few steps into the hallway. Again, his face was a study in terror. The commandos would assume that their target was situated in a darkened corner of the room, out of their sight line, holding a sophisticated long-range rifle. The angle would permit him to kill his hostage without exposing himself to danger. Yet the two commandos had no choice but to go along. Time was on their side; their plan, now, was to stall as long as possible, to allow the other members of the team to assemble. Ambler could see it in their faces. Perhaps the hostage’s death was an acceptable cost for completing the Tarquin sanction—but that call could only be made by their commanding officer.

  Ambler took another step toward the second, larger commando, saw the man’s sea-green eyes, dark hair, and second day’s growth of beard. The commando considered the hostage to be little more than an impediment and a nuisance—an unknown that could not yet be removed from the equation. He was no longer holding his G36 in firing position; there seemed no point.

  Now Ambler allowed himself to quiver with ostensible fear. He glanced back into the darkened room, pretended he could see a rifle trained at his head, conveyed this with a sharp intake of breath. Then he turned beseechingly back to the black-clad operative.

  “He’s going to kill me,” Ambler repeated. “I know it, I know. I can see it in his eyes.” As he spoke, words rushed out with mounting hysteria. Ambler began to flail his arms around, with corresponding agitation. “You need to help me. God, please help me. Call the U.S. ambassador, Sam Hurlbut will vouch for me. I’m good people, I am. But please don’t leave me with that, that maniac.” As he spoke, he leaned forward, toward the commando, as if to try to speak to him in confidence.

  “You need to calm down,” the commando said in a hushed bark, scarcely concealing his distaste for the jabbering, panicking civilian, who was coming too close and talking too much as he continued to flail his hands wildly, until—

  The opportunities will come. Take them.

  “And you need to help me you need to help me you need to help me—” The panicked-sounding words rushed out independent of any sense. Ambler pitched himself forward, even closer to the commando; he could smell the operative’s rancid stress sweat.

  Grab the weapon by the buttstock, not the magazine. The magazine could snap off, leaving the bullets already chambered in the rifle. His grip on the trigger guard is loose. Grab it now—

  With cobra-strike swiftness, Ambler wrested the G36 from the commando and slammed the silencer-cuffed barrel against his head. As the large man slumped to the ground, Ambler trained the assault rifle at the man’s startled partner.

  He saw a man trying to reassess all his assumptions, utterly bewildered. Ambler flicked the G36 on full fire.

  “Drop yours now,” he ordered.

  The man did so, backing up slowly.

  Ambler knew what the man was preparing to do. “Freeze,” he shouted.

  But the man kept backing away, his hands raised. When an operation had gone wrong, you evacuated. That was the rule you followed before any other rule came into play.

  Ambler just watched as the man suddenly turned and ran out of the apartment, raced down the street, and disappeared, no doubt to rejoin his squad and regroup. Ambler and Caston, too, would need to evacuate immediately and regroup in their own way. In the event, killing the gunman would have been pointless.

  There were too many operatives waiting to take his place.

  BEIJING

  Chao Tang was an early riser and, like many early risers in a position of authority, compelled those who worked for him to become early risers, too, by the simple expedient of scheduling meetings at dawn. Members of his support staff at the Ministry of State Security had grown accustomed to his ways; little by little, they discontinued the late evenings of drinking rice wine, the sportive nightlife that senior members of the government could afford. The indulgences were not worth the pounding 6:00 A.M. headaches. Little by little, the bleary eyes cleared up to a look of calm alertness; the early-morning meetings no longer seemed like such a terrible imposition.

  But the morning’s meeting—a review of objectives accomplished and still pending—was now the furthest thing from his mind. He was in the secure communication room, poring over a communiqué that had arrived for him overnight, his eyes only, and what he had learned was profoundly disturbing. If Joe Li’s dispatch was correct, the situation they confronted was even more dire than he had imagined. For Comrade Li’s description of the incident in the Luxembourg Gardens violated their operating assumptions; new ones had to be arrived at, and swiftly. The question of why weigh
ed upon Chao Tang greatly.

  Could Joe Li have been mistaken? Chao Tang could not credit it. The report could not be dismissed. There were many enemies to contend with, but their greatest enemy, at the moment, was time. Chao could not wait any longer for Liu Ang to come to his senses.

  Chao had to take a further, direct action on his own. Some would regard it as treason, an unconscionable and unpardonable transgression.

  Yet Liu Ang’s recalcitrance had given Chao no choice.

  Chao took a deep breath. The message had to be delivered with both celerity and secrecy. And it had to be of a nature that would ensure that it would be accepted for what it was and acted upon. Normal rules of operating had to be suspended. The stakes were too great for normal.

  As he transmitted his encoded instructions, he tried to reassure himself that he had taken the desperate measures that the situation required. If he had miscalculated, however, he had just made the biggest mistake of his life. Anxieties and apprehensions sluiced through his mind.

  And so did the words of Joe Li’s dispatch. Who else knew about it? The young man who delivered it to him, Shen Wang, was as bright eyed and bushy tailed this morning as he was every morning. At first Comrade Chao had been wary of him. He was effectively “on loan” from the People’s Liberation Army—that was the terminology, but it was misleading. In order to promote the development of a common government culture—or, equally, to discourage the development of departmental division—the PLA had taken to “seconding” junior officers to the civilian branches of government. The catch was that one could not refuse such an assigned person, at least not without incurring grave displeasure. Thus a young factotum from the PLA was to spend a year as an intern at the central office of the Ministry of State Security. The MSS, in turn, placed one of its own at the PLA, but the consensus was that the PLA had the better of the deal.

  At the MSS, the suspicion, of course, was that the PLA intern would report back to his PLA masters. Shen Wang was known to be a protégé of General Lam, a stiff-necked figure whom Chao regarded with a measure of distaste. Yet despite Chao’s initial suspicions, the fresh-faced young man had steadily grown on him. Shen Wang was tireless, industrious, wholly devoid of cynicism. Chao had to admit that the young man—he could not be any older than twenty-five—seemed to be a true idealist, the sort of young man that Chao had once been.

  Now Shen Wang appeared at the doorway, clearing his throat discreetly.

  “If you will excuse my presumption, sir,” he said, “you seem concerned.”

  Chao looked up at the hardworking intern. Had he looked at the communiqué himself? But his expression was so unclouded it seemed impossible he was guilty of any such thing.

  “Matters have long been complicated,” Chao replied. “This morning they grow more so.”

  Shen Wang bowed his head and was silent for a moment. “You work so hard,” he said. “I think you are the hardest-working man I know.”

  Chao smiled wanly. “You’re well on the way to outshining your elder.”

  “I cannot know the complexities of the state matters that burden you,” Shen Wang said. “But I know that your shoulders are broader than any burden.” He was alluding to an old proverb, his reassurance stopping just short of flattery.

  “Let us hope so.”

  “Comrade Chao recalls his lunch appointment?”

  Chao smiled distractedly. “You’ll have to remind me.”

  Shen Wang glanced down at Chao’s daily schedule. “A luncheon celebration of the People’s Heroes. At the Peninsula Palace.”

  “I suppose I’d better get going then,” Comrade Chao said. Neither needed to bemoan aloud the city’s impossible traffic. Even a short trip involved an inordinate amount of time. Nor could someone in Comrade Chao’s position travel without the protection of an armored car and a specially trained driver.

  A few minutes later, as Chao climbed into the back of his black limousine, he reflected on Shen Wang’s perceptiveness and graceful manner. Chao prided himself on recognizing potential, and he believed that this young man had a considerable future.

  After ten minutes of sludge-like traffic, the sedan finally roared over an overpass at a reasonable speed.

  A few hundred feet away, in the lane opposite, an enormous yellow bulldozer was visible. Roadwork of some sort, Chao thought, further ensnarling traffic. It was unfortunate that it could not have been postponed until a more reasonable hour of the day. At least it was in the opposite lane.

  “Traffic’s not so bad going our way, eh?” Comrade Chao’s driver said.

  The MSS director never replied. Instead, a scream exploded from his throat as the crushing impact came—so suddenly and unexpectedly. The enormous bulldozer, with its shovel blade low to the ground, had veered into their lane, and the sedan had been boxed in by the cars to either side. The windshield was smashed into pebbled shrapnel, piercing eyes and arteries; metal screamed against metal, twisting and crushing upon itself as the car lunged off the ground, lifted up by the shovel blade. Now the bulldozer crushed the sedan against the guardrail until the buckling vehicle catapulted over it and plunged onto a vast concrete basin below, where it burst into flames.

  High in the unseen cab, the bulldozer’s driver spoke into a cell phone. “The cleanup is completed,” the driver said, in the rough dialect of the northern countryside.

  “Thank you,” Shen Wang told him. Given the soaring number of traffic accidents in Beijing these days, the death on the overpass would be dismaying but perhaps not altogether surprising. “The general will be very pleased.”

  PARIS

  “What’s this?” Laurel asked, eyes widening in alarm. She and Ambler were in the hotel room, and he had just removed his shirt. Now she came over to him, running her fingers along a purplish bruise on the side of Ambler’s shoulder.

  “Caston’s safe house wasn’t all that safe, it turned out,” Ambler admitted.

  “Can you really trust that man?” Laurel asked, with a sharp look. She seemed uneasy, frightened for him.

  “I have to think so.”

  “Why, Hal? How can you be so sure?”

  “Because if I can’t trust him, I can’t trust myself.” He stopped. “It’s hard to explain.”

  She nodded slowly. “You don’t have to. I understand. . . .” She trailed off. “I don’t know why I’m worrying about it. The world stopped making sense a long time ago.”

  “A few days ago,” Ambler corrected.

  “Longer.”

  “Since I came into it.” Acid splashed the back of his throat. “A stranger. A stranger to myself.”

  Warningly: “Don’t.” Now she ran her fingertips over his chest, his shoulders, his arms, as if confirming that he was real, a person of flesh and blood, not a phantasm. When she met his gaze again, her eyes were moist. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”

  “Count your blessings.”

  She shook her head. “You’re a good person.” She tapped the center of his chest. “With a good heart.”

  “And someone else’s head.”

  “Piss on that,” she said in a mock snarl. “They tried to erase you, but you know what? You’re realer than any man I’ve ever met.”

  “Laurel,” he said, stopping when he heard the catch in his own voice.

  “When I’m with you, it’s like . . . it’s like discovering I’d been all by myself my whole life long without fully realizing it, because I never knew what it was like to be together with someone—really together. That’s how I feel when I’m with you. Like I’d always been alone and now I’m not. I can’t go back to the way it was before. I can’t go back to that.” Her voice thickened with emotion. “You want to talk about what you’ve done to me, what you’ve put me through? That’s what you’ve done to me. And I don’t ever want it to come undone.”

  His mouth was dry. “Nothing frightens me more than losing you.”

  “I’m not lost anymore.” Her amber eyes seemed lit from within; the green flecks glittered.
“You’ve saved my life in more ways than one.”

  “You’re the one, Laurel. Nothing makes sense without you. Not for me. I’m just—”

  “Harrison Ambler,” she said, smiling as she spoke the name aloud. “Harrison Ambler.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Musée Armandier did not “mérite le détour,” in Michelin-speak; it scarcely qualified as being worth a visit. But Ambler remembered it well from the year he spent in Paris as a youth and doubted it had changed much. It was one of the few private art museums in Paris and, to maintain its fiscal status as a museum, dutifully kept regular hours of admission. Yet it was largely deserted; it probably had less traffic than it did when it had been a private residence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a house—a neo-Italian villa, in style, with grandly arching windows deeply set in Purbeck limestone, and a partially enclosed courtyard—it was not unimpressive. Built by a Protestant banker who profited enormously from deals during the Second Empire, it was situated in the Plaine Marceau section of the Eighth Arrondissement, then a neighborhood favored by Bonapartist noblemen and a newer class of financiers and notably quiet even now. From time to time, the Musée Armandier would be rented by film crews working on costume dramas. Otherwise it was among the least visited public spaces in Paris. A fine place for a youthful assignation, perhaps—Ambler smiled at a long-ago memory—but of little interest to the museum-going public. The trouble was the collection. Marcel Armandier’s wife, Jacqueline Armandier, had a taste for rococo art from the early eighteenth century, a school of work that had been decidedly out of fashion for the past half century. Worse still, she had a penchant for second-rate rococo art—canvases by such minor talents as François Boucher, Nicolas de Largillière, Francesco Trevisani, and Giacomo Amiconi. She liked her cupids to be plump and beaming, cavorting in a perfectly turquoise sky, and her Arcadian shepherds to be as Arcadian as possible. She sized up the landscapes as if it were the property depicted, not the picture itself, that she were acquiring.