The Ambler Warning

  In deeding the mansion to be a museum, Jacqueline, who survived her husband by a decade, must have hoped she was ensuring that her possessions would be celebrated through the succeeding generations. Instead, the odd art historian who paid a visit generally greeted Jacqueline’s collection with muted catcalls or, worse, the mockery of campy adoration.

  Ambler appreciated the museum for other reasons: unpopular as it was, it was a good place for a private encounter, and the combination of plentiful windows and a quiet street would enable him to detect any stalker patrols. At the same time, the Armandier foundation, charged with husbanding a limited budget, hired only a single guard for the whole museum, and the guard seldom wandered farther up than the second floor.

  Now Ambler mounted the stairs to the fourth floor and turned down a hallway with gilt moldings and a long painting of lyre-strumming goddesses cavorting on what looked like a golf course and made his way to the large room at the end, where he and Caston had agreed to meet.

  His footsteps were muffled by the peach-colored carpeting, and he could hear Caston’s voice as he approached.

  Ambler froze, felt a prickle of apprehension running down his neck. Was Caston with someone?

  Silently he came closer, until he could make out the words.

  “Good,” Caston was saying. And: “Is that right?” And: “So they’re doing OK?” A man talking on a cell phone. There was a long moment of silence. “Good night, hugglebunny,” Caston said. “Love you, too.” He closed the flip phone and pocketed it as Ambler entered the room.

  “Glad you made it,” Caston said.

  “ ‘Hugglebunny’?” Ambler asked.

  Flushing, the auditor turned and looked out the window. “I had my office check the Border Control database,” the auditor said after a while. “Dr. Ashton Palmer arrived in Roissy yesterday. He’s here.”

  “Your office—can you trust their discretion?”

  “I say ‘my office,’ but it’s really one person. My assistant. And yes, I trust him.”

  “What else did you learn?”

  “I didn’t say I learned anything else.”

  “You did,” Ambler corrected him. “Just not in words.”

  Caston glanced around at the canvas-crowded walls and scowled. “The thing is, it’s messy, and I’m not sure what to make of it yet. It’s what they call ‘chatter’—small interceptions, some fragmentary in nature, each inconclusive on its own.”

  “But added together?”

  “Something’s going on—or maybe I should say that something’s about to happen. Something involving—”

  “China,” Ambler broke in.

  “Well, that’s the easier part of the conundrum.”

  “You’re talking in riddles yourself.”

  “The harder part is you. Approaching matters logically, that’s the place to start. Call it a variant of the anthropic principle. What we call observation selection effects.”

  “Look, Caston, would you try speaking English?”

  Caston glared. “Observation selection effects are totally commonplace. At the supermarket, have you ever noticed how often you find yourself in the longer checkout line? Why is that? Because those are the lines with the most people in them. Let’s say I told you that Mr. Smith, about whom you knew nothing at all, was standing on one of the checkout lines, and you had to predict which one, based only on knowing how many people were in each line.”

  “There’d be no way to know.”

  “But inference is about probabilities. And the most probable outcome, obviously, is that he’s in the line with the most people in it. Once you step back and consider yourself from an outsider’s perspective, it becomes self-evident. The slowest traffic lane is the one with the most cars in it. The laws of probability say that any given driver is most likely to be in that lane. That means you. It’s not bad luck or delusion that makes you think the other lanes of traffic are going faster. More often than not, they are going faster.”

  “Right,” Ambler said. “It’s obvious.”

  “It is obvious,” Caston said. “Once it’s pointed out. Just as if you knew nothing more about a person except that he or she lived on this planet today, and you were asked to guess the person’s country of origin, you should guess that the person is Chinese. You’d be wrong less often than if you named any other country of origin, simply because China is the world’s most populous nation.”

  “News flash,” Ambler said. “I’m not Chinese.”

  “No, but you’ve become entangled in something that involves Chinese politics. And the question is: Why you? In the case of the checkout line, not much distinguishes you from any other shopper. But in this case, the population—the list of eligible candidates—is a lot more rarefied.”

  “I didn’t choose this thing. I was chosen.”

  “Again, the question is why?” the auditor pressed. “What information did they have about you? Which data points were pertinent?”

  Ambler remembered what various people involved in the Strategic Services Group had told him. He was special, from their perspective. “Paul Fenton told me they decided I was a magician because I’d ‘erased’ myself.”

  “When, in point of fact, you’d been ‘erased,’ if you want to put it that way. But this suggests that they had a particular need for an agent who can’t be identified. And not just any agent, either. An agent with special skills—an agent with fantastically honed skills at inferring emotion. A walking polygraph.”

  “Fenton had my Stab records, or some of them. He didn’t know my name, my real name, but he knew my assignments, what I’d done, where I’d been.”

  “So consider that factor, too. There are your inherent characteristics, and there are these historical ones: who you are and what you’ve done. Either or both could be relevant.”

  “Wouldn’t want to leap to conclusions, huh?”

  Caston smiled wanly. His eyes lingered on a painting of a verdant expanse of rolling green with a picturesque scattering of dappled cows and a flaxen-haired milkmaid with a beatific glow carrying a pail. “You know the old story about an economist, a physicist, and a mathematician driving through Scotland? They see a brown cow out of the window, and the economist says, ‘Fascinating that the cows in Scotland are brown.’ The physicist says, ‘I’m afraid you’re overgeneralizing from the evidence. All we know is that some cows in Scotland are brown.’ Finally, the mathematician shakes his head at both of them. ‘Wrong again. Completely unwarranted by the evidence. All we can infer, logically, is that there exists at least one cow in this country, at least one side of which is brown.’ ”

  Ambler rolled his eyes. “I was wrong when I said you were the guy gets to the shoot-out in time to pick up the shell casings. Actually, you’re the guy who, a thousand years later, picks the shell casings out of an archaeological dig.”

  Caston just looked at him. “I’m simply trying to get you to look for patterns. Because the fact is that there’s a pattern here. Changhua. Montreal. And now Paris—the Deschesnes incident.”

  “Changhua . . . I tried to stop it. Too late, but I tried.”

  “But you failed. And you were there.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning there’s very likely photographic evidence of your presence. You can’t infer much from a single brown cow. But three brown cows in a row? That’s where the laws of probability come into play. The question is why they wanted you. And what they really wanted you for. Changhua. Montreal. Paris. It’s not just a string of events, Ambler. It’s a sequence.”

  “Fine,” Ambler said testily. The overheated museum was causing him to perspire. “It’s a sequence. What’s that mean?”

  “Meaning we need to do the math. Zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five—that’s the Fibonacci sequence. A child might look at those numbers and not see the pattern. But the pattern is staring him in the face. Each number in the series is the sum of the preceding two. Every series is like that, howev
er random it might appear. There’s a pattern, a rule, an algorithm, and it makes order out of seeming chaos. That’s what we need here. We need to see how each event is connected to the one before, because then we’ll know what the next event is going to be.” Caston looked grave. “Then again, we can just wait for the next event to happen. That might make everything clear. From every indication we’ve got, we’re about to see what it’s all leading up to.”

  “In which case it’s probably too late,” Ambler grunted. “So it’s a progression. Meaning, basically, you have no idea what the logic is.”

  “Meaning we need to find out.” Caston gave him a look that was both wry and wintry. “If I were superstitious, I’d say you were bad luck.”

  “Luck can change.”

  The auditor winced. “True sequences don’t change. Not unless you change them.”

  LANGLEY

  Adrian Choi fidgeted with his ear stud as he sat at his boss’s desk. It felt good, sitting there, and there couldn’t be any harm in it. Besides, it wasn’t as if anybody ever passed by—the hallway where Caston had his office wasn’t out-of-bounds, but it was out of the way. Office space Siberia. Adrian made another phone call.

  Caston had been dogged about trying to get those Parrish Island personnel files, and when Adrian asked how he could hope to succeed where Caston had failed, he said that thing about charm. Adrian didn’t have Caston’s authority, but there were informal routes. He smiled his sunniest smile as he called an assistant at the Joint Facilities Center, someone at his level. Caston had spoken to her boss to no avail. He’d grumbled and protested and blustered. Adrian would try another approach.

  The woman who answered would need a lot of warming up. She sounded immediately wary.

  “PIPF Ward 4W—yes, I know,” she said. “I’ll have to process the request forms.”

  “No, see, you guys already gave us a copy of the files,” Adrian lied.

  “Joint Facilities did?”

  “Yup,” Adrian said breezily. “I’m just asking for another copy.”

  “Oh,” the young woman said, a little less frostily. “Sorry. Bureaucracy, right?”

  “Tell me about it,” Adrian said, making his voice as silkily confiding as he could. “I’d like to say it was a matter of national security. But it’s really a matter of saving my own ass.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, Caitlin—it’s Caitlin, right?”

  “That’s right,” she said. Was he imagining it, or was she warming up, ever so subtly?

  “You sound like the kind of person who never messes up, so I don’t expect much sympathy from you.”

  “Me?” She giggled. “Are you kidding?”

  “Nah, I know your type. You’ve got everything under control. Every scrap of paper’s in order in your office.”

  “No comment,” she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice.

  “Hey, it’s important to have somebody to look up to,” Adrian said. “I’ve got this whole image of you in my mind—you got to let me cherish that.”

  “You’re a funny guy.”

  “Then I must have been clowning when I forwarded the file directly to the DDI’s office without keeping a copy for my boss.” Adrian’s voice was wheedling but a little flirtatious, too. “Which means my boss is totally going to pitch a fit. And my Stanford-educated ass is grass.” He paused. “Listen, that’s my problem, not yours. I didn’t mean to lay this on you. Never mind. Really.”

  The young woman on the other end of the line sighed. “It’s just that they’ve been really uptight about the whole thing, God knows why. Everything’s in some Omega-level sequestered database.”

  “Intramural rivalries are always the fiercest, right?”

  “I guess,” she said doubtfully. “Listen, I’ll see what I can do, OK?”

  “You’re a lifesaver, Caitlin,” said Adrian. “I mean that.”

  PARIS

  Burton Lasker looked at his watch yet again and prowled the Air France lounge. It wasn’t like Fenton to be late. Yet the flight had already started to board, and Fenton had still not appeared. Lasker checked with the attendants at the gate. They replied to his questioning gaze with a simple shake of the head; he had already asked them two or three times whether Fenton had appeared. A wave of annoyance swept through Lasker. There were any number of circumstances that could delay a passenger, but Fenton was the sort of person who prepared for the usual exigencies and inconveniences of travel. He had a well-developed sense of the tolerances of daily life and knew how far to test them. So where was he now? Why wasn’t he answering his cell phone?

  Lasker had been in Fenton’s employ for a decade and, at least for the past several years, could style himself Fenton’s staunchest lieutenant. Every visionary required someone who devoted himself to the tightly focused task of execution—of follow-through. Lasker excelled at that. He was a veteran of the Special Forces, but he never felt the contempt that some military men had for the civilian: Fenton was a patron of the operatives, as some people were patrons of artists. And Fenton truly was a visionary—truly understood how a private–public partnership could transform America’s strengths in clandestine operations. Fenton, in turn, respected Lasker for his firsthand knowledge of ops and combat and the subtler operations of the counterterrorism squadrons he had helped train. Lasker considered his years with Fenton the most valuable and gratifying of his entire adult life.

  Where was the man? As the Air France attendants, with an apologetic shrug, closed the ramp doors, Lasker felt an icicle of fear within his gut. Something was wrong. He phoned the front desk of the hotel where he and Fenton had both been staying. “No, Monsieur Fenton has not checked out.” Something was very wrong.

  Laurel Holland finally joined the other two men at the still-deserted fourth floor of the Musée Armandier a few minutes later than they had planned—her errands had taken her longer than she had expected, she explained.

  “You must be Clayton Caston,” she said to the auditor, and extended a hand. Her posture, as well as her words, was slightly formal. She still seemed to fear what he was, what he represented as a senior CIA official. At the same time, she trusted Ambler’s judgment implicitly. He had made the decision to deal with Caston; she would follow suit. Ambler had to hope that he was not mistaken.

  “I’m Clay,” the auditor replied, “in your hands, anyway. Nice to meet you, Laurel.”

  “Your first time in France, Hal tells me. Mine, too, if you can believe it.”

  “My first time, and, if I’m lucky, my last time,” Caston groused. “I hate this country. At the hotel I turned on the shower knob marked C and practically scalded myself. I swear I could hear fifty million Frenchmen laughing.”

  “Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong,” Laurel told him solemnly. “Isn’t that what they say?”

  “Fifty million Frenchmen,” Caston replied with a reproving stare, “can be wrong in fifty million ways.”

  “But who’s counting?” Ambler said lightly, scanning the faces of the few pedestrians in the area. He glanced down at the newspaper Laurel had taken with her for cover. Le Monde diplomatique. On the front page was an article by one Bertrand Louis-Cohn, apparently an intellectual of note. Ambler skimmed it; the occasion was a conference of the World Economic Forum at Davos, but the content seemed to be gaseous generalizations about the current economic conjuncture. Something about “la pensée unique,” which, Louis-Cohn wrote, could be defined by its enemies as “la projection idéologique des intérêts financiers de la capitale mondiale”—the ideological projection of the financial interests of global capital—or “l’hégémonie des riches,” the hegemony of the rich. On and on it went, recycling leftist criticisms of l’orthodoxie libérale without either endorsing them or rejecting them. The whole essay seemed like some sort of weirdly stylized activity, intellectual kabuki.

  “What’s that say?” Laurel asked, pointing to the article.

  “It’s about some meeting of global titan
s in Davos. The World Economic Forum.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Is the guy for it or against it?”

  “Beats the hell out of me,” Ambler said.

  “I was there once,” the auditor said. “The World Economic Forum wanted my expertise for some panel on money laundering. They like a scattering of people who actually know what they’re talking about. It’s like the greenery in a floral arrangement.”

  Ambler peered through the window to the street again, confirming that nobody suspicious had entered the vicinity. “Here’s the thing. I’m tired of playing blindman’s buff. We know there’s a pattern here—a progression or sequence, like you say. But this time I need to know the next step ahead of time.”

  “My assistant is working on getting more information from Joint Intel Resources,” Caston said. “I think we should wait to see what he finds out.”

  Ambler gave the back-office man a flinty look. “You’re along for the ride, Caston. Nothing more. Like I say, this isn’t your world.”

  Wu Jingu was a soft-spoken man, but he found he seldom had difficulty making himself heard. His career in the Ministry of State Security had established his reputation as a sober analyst, someone who was neither a Pollyanna nor an alarmist. He was someone people listened to. Yet President Liu Ang was frustratingly unmoved by his counsel. Little wonder that the muscles in Wu’s narrow shoulders were bunched with tension.

  He lay facedown and motionless on the narrow cushioned table as he readied himself for his twice-weekly massage, trying to banish the stress from his mind.

  “Your muscles are so very tight,” the masseuse said, her strong fingers manipulating the flesh around his shoulders.