The Ambler Warning

  “Please,” the Southerner moaned.

  Small pinpricks of blood were visible at the projecting edges of the jagged implement. “A word of advice. If you’re going to take a gun to a knife fight, make sure you win.” Ambler’s voice was arctic and assured. That was part of the craft of interrogation: the aura of utter determination and ruthlessness.

  He focused on the long-barreled rifle. A Paxarms MK24B. A .509-caliber syringe projection rifle.

  “A pretty fancy piece of equipment,” Ambler said. “Not part of GI Joe’s usual kit bag. What’s the deal?” He pressed down again with the fish scaler.

  “Please,” the man said, and it was as if all the air had come out of him.

  “You were tasked to an abduction detail. Instructions were to knock me out—and then what?”

  “Those weren’t exactly the instructions.” The man sounded almost sheepish. “Seems the people I work for have taken a real interest in you.”

  “The people you work for,” Ambler repeated. “The government, you mean.”

  “Huh?” A puzzled look, as if he thought Ambler might be teasing him but wasn’t sure. “We’re talking about a strictly private outfit, OK? I don’t work for a government pay grade, that’s for damn sure. They said you might show up, and if so, I was to make an approach.”

  Ambler head-pointed to the Paxarms rifle. “That’s what you mean by an ‘approach’?”

  “They said to use my discretion if I thought you might be dangerous.” He shrugged. “So I took the trank gun just in case.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged again. “I thought you might be dangerous.”

  Ambler’s gaze was unblinking. “Was there a drop-off point in the scenario?”

  “I wasn’t told ahead of time. They were going to radio that info to me once I reported in that you were either on board or in custody. Assuming you showed. I don’t know how likely they thought that was.”

  “They? I have to tell you, that’s not my favorite word.”

  “Look, these people hire me to do jobs, but they do it at a remove. It’s not like we play mah-jong on Sundays, OK? The sense I got was, they just learned you were on the market, and they want to sign you up before someone else does.”

  “Nice to be in demand.” Ambler struggled to process what he was hearing. Meanwhile, it was important that he not let the rhythm of questioning falter. “Method of contact?”

  “We’ve got a kind of long-distance relationship. This morning I got an encrypted e-mail with the instruction. Partial payment was wired into an account. The deal was on.” The words came out in a rush. “No meetings. Total breakaway security.”

  The man was telling him the truth—and his words told Ambler even more than their explicit content. Breakaway security. Jargon from U.S. intelligence. “You’re an American operative,” Ambler said.

  “Retired, like I said. Used to be MI.” Military intelligence, then. “Special Forces for seven years.”

  “So now you’re freelance.”

  “You got it.”

  Ambler unzipped a pouch attached to the man’s camouflage vest. There was a slightly battered-looking Nokia cell phone, probably for personal use, and Ambler pocketed it. He also found, as he expected, a military version of a BlackBerry text-messaging device. End-to-end RASP data security. Both the gunman and the outfit that had recruited him were accustomed to using U.S. clandestine-service equipment.

  “So here’s the barter,” Ambler said. “You tell me the e-mail protocol and your pass codes.”

  There was a pause. Then, with a new look of resolve, the man slowly shook his head. “Dream on.”

  Ambler felt a twinge; once again, he had to regain the dominant position. He knew, studying the emotions on the man’s countenance, that he wasn’t dealing with a fanatic, a true believer. The man before him really was play-for-pay. His objective was to maintain his reputation for reliability; future jobs depended on it. What Ambler needed to impress upon him was that his having a future at all depended upon his cooperation. At times like this, an air of calm reasonableness wasn’t effective. Rather, the air to be projected was that of a resolute sadist, happy to be provided with any opportunity to ply his craft.

  “Do you know what a man’s face looks like when it’s flayed?” Ambler said evenly. “I do. The dermal matrix is surprisingly tough, but it adheres only loosely to the layers of lipid and muscle underneath it. Once you cut a flap, in other words, the skin separates quite easily from the fascia beneath. It’s like stripping sod from a lawn. And once you lift up the skin, you can see the incredibly intricate striation of the facial muscles. The fish scaler isn’t the ideal tool for it—it’s very messy, makes very ragged cuts. Still, it gets the job done. You won’t be in a position to look, I’m afraid, but I’ll describe what I see. That way you won’t miss anything. Now then. Shall we begin? You might feel a little pinch. Well, more than a pinch. It’ll feel more like—well, like someone’s tearing your face off.”

  The kneeling man’s eyes constricted in fear. “You said a barter,” the man said. “What do I get?”

  “Oh, that. You get to—how shall I put it? Save face.”

  The man swallowed hard. “Pass code is 1345GD,” he said hoarsely. “Repeat: 1345GD.”

  “A friendly reminder. If you lie, I’ll know immediately,” Ambler said. “Get a single detail wrong, and we’ll return to our anatomy lesson. You need to understand this.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  A wintry smile. “I know.”

  “E-mail encryption is automatic with the hardware. Subject line must say: ‘Seeking Ulysses.’ Capitalizing doesn’t matter. Sign-off is ‘Cyclop.’ ” The man continued to detail the communication protocols that had been established, and Ambler committed them to memory.

  “You got to let me go, man,” the Southerner said after Ambler had made him repeat everything three times.

  Ambler took off his tan jacket and put on the man’s combat vest and camouflage jacket; they seemed like articles that were likely to come in handy. He fished out the man’s belt wallet and strapped it on himself; most off-the-books operatives carried substantial sums of cash on them, and that, too, might come in handy. The Beretta remained lost somewhere in the thorny underbrush.

  As for the rifle, its bulk would make it more of an impediment to Ambler than an advantage, at least in the short term—and right now the short term stretched before him like a dozen lifetimes. He field-stripped it and tossed the six remaining tranquilizer darts into the thickets. Only then did he untie the man’s hands and toss him his tan jacket. “So you don’t freeze,” he said.

  Ambler felt a slight stinging sensation at the side of his neck—a gnat, a mosquito?—and absently slapped at it with a hand. It was a few moments before he realized that there would be no such insects around at this time of the year, and by then, he had noticed that his fingertips were wet with his own blood. Not an insect. Not a dart.

  A bullet.

  He whirled around. The man he had just untied crumpled to the ground, bright red blood spilling from his mouth, the fixed stare of death on his face. A sniper’s bullet—the same bullet that grazed Ambler’s neck—must have entered his mouth and penetrated the back of his head. Ambler had decided to spare the man’s life. Someone else had not.

  Or was the bullet meant for Ambler?

  He had to run. Ambler plunged through the woods at top speed. His gift of the tan coat might well have been a death sentence, flagging the man for execution. A distant sniper would have keyed to the color. But why send someone to “make an approach” if the plan was to kill him?

  Ambler had to leave the Sourlands. The Honda had no doubt already been located. What other vehicles were in the area? He remembered seeing a tarp-covered Gator, a quarter of a mile up the hill. It was a low green off-road utility vehicle, capable of traversing almost any terrain—swamps, streams, hills.

  When he reached it, he wasn’t surprised to find that the keys were in it. This was still a
part of the world where nobody locked his front door. The Gator started up easily, and Ambler drove through the woods as fast as it would go, holding on to the steering wheel when the vehicle bounced over rocks, ducking his head down when low branches threatened. It lurched easily over brambles and thickets; as long as he had room to maneuver between trees, the underbrush would not stop him. Nor would the rocky gulches and streams. The ride was bumpy and lurching, like mounting a horse that hadn’t quite been broken; but its grip of the terrain was never less than secure.

  The windshield of the Gator suddenly exploded, turned opaque with spiderwebbing.

  A second bullet had finally arrived.

  He steered crazily, randomly, hoping that the bouncing of the vehicle on rough terrain would make him harder to keep in the crosshairs of the sniper scope. Meanwhile, his mind reeled, in a wilderness of uncertainties. The line of fire told him that the shot had to have been fired from somewhere across the lake—somewhere in the area of McGruder’s old house. Or the pylon farther up the hill. Or—he scanned the horizon in his mind—the grain silo at the Steptoe farm, a little up the hill. Yes, that’s where he would set up if he was running an op. Safety lay up—up the slopes to where the incline gave way to an indented area. A paved road ran along it, and if he could reach it, he’d be protected from the sniper by the earth itself.

  Gunning the engine, he found the vehicle was able to move up the steepest slopes of the Sourland Mountains with ease; ten minutes later, he reached the road. The Gator was too slow to keep up with regular automotive traffic, and the gunshot-shattered windshield would attract the wrong kind of notice. So he drove the Gator behind a dense stand of eastern red cedars and turned off the engine.

  There was no sound of any pursuer, no sound of anything but the ticking of the Gator’s stilled engine and the rushing of cars on the nearby mountain road.

  He took out the slain man’s PDA. They want to sign you up. The man had believed it, but was it a ruse? Clearly, whatever outfit had recruited the American ex-operative intended to keep itself at a remove: breakaway security. Yet Ambler had to learn what they knew. Now it was up to him to make an “approach,” but on his terms and as someone other than who he was. To overcome the mechanisms of caution, the message needed to promise something—threaten something? The imagination was a powerful thing: the less specific the message, the better.

  After a few moments’ thought, he thumb-typed a message, one that was terse but carefully crafted.

  An encounter with the subject, he explained, had not gone as planned, but he now found himself in possession of some “interesting documents.” A meeting would be necessary. He kept the explanation minimal, without elaboration of any sort.

  Awaiting instructions, he typed. Then he sent the message off to whoever was at the other end of the cryptosystem.

  Now he made his way to the side of the road. In the camouflage jacket, he would look like an out-of-season hunter. Few people from the area were likely to disapprove. A couple of minutes later, a middle-aged woman driving a GMC with an overflowing cigarette tray picked him up. She had a lot on her mind and talked nonstop before dropping him off at the Motel 6 near Route 173. Ambler was certain he had made polite noises as she spoke, but he barely heard a word.

  Seventy-five dollars for a room. For a brief moment he worried that he wouldn’t have enough, but then he remembered the belt wallet. Checking in—under a randomly confected name—he struggled to keep at bay the utter exhaustion that threatened to engulf him at any moment and probably would have even without whatever carfentanyl remained in his system. He needed a room. He needed a rest.

  The room was as utterly nondescript as he could have hoped: the style of no style. Hurriedly he went through the contents of the slain man’s belt wallet. There were two sets of identification cards; most useful would be the driver’s license from Georgia, where the computer systems were particularly unevolved. The license looked unremarkable, but as Ambler flexed it, he could tell that it was actually designed to make alteration easy. Ambler would have no difficulty getting a postage-size photograph of himself at a shopping mall and adapting a license that had been spurious to begin with. The operative’s height and eye color were different from his, but not dramatically enough to arouse notice. Tomorrow—but there were so many things he would have to deal with tomorrow. So many things that he was too exhausted to contemplate right now.

  Indeed, he felt on the verge of blacking out: the combination of physical and emotional stress was nearly overwhelming. Instead, he force-marched himself into the shower, made the water as hot as he could tolerate, and remained there for a long time, sudsing the sweat, blood, and grime off his body until nothing remained of the small motel-issue bar of soap. Only then did he stagger out of the shower and begin to dry himself with the white cotton towels.

  There was so much he needed to ponder—and yet he somehow felt that he could not allow himself to do so. Not now. Not today.

  He towel-dried his hair vigorously and stepped over to the mirror above the sink. It was fogged with steam, and he heated it with the hair dryer until an oval was cleared. He could not remember the last time he had seen his own face—how many months had it been?—and he braced himself for a haggard countenance.

  When he finally saw himself in the mirror, vertigo overcame him completely.

  It was the face of a stranger.

  Ambler could feel his knees buckling beneath him, and, the next thing he knew, he was on the floor.

  The man in the mirror was unrecognizable to him. It wasn’t a gaunter or harrowed version of him. It wasn’t him with an age-etched brow or dark hollows beneath his eyes. It wasn’t him at all.

  The high, angular cheekbones, the aquiline nose: it was a perfectly handsome face—a face most would consider more handsome than his own—save for a certain cruelty to the visage. His own nose had been more rounded, broad and slightly fleshy at the tip; his cheeks had been more convex, the chin cleft. He is not me, Ambler thought, and the illogic battered him like a powerful wave.

  Who was the man he saw in the mirror?

  It was a face that he could not recognize but that he could read. And what he read in it was the same emotion that filled his own breast: terror. No, something beyond terror. Dread.

  The cataract of psychiatric jargon to which he had been subjected during his months of captivity—dissociative identity disorder, personality fragmentation, and on and on—suddenly filled his mind. He could hear, as if in a chorus of murmured voices, the doctors’ insistence that he had suffered a psychotic break and was drifting through fictive identities.

  Could they have been right?

  Was he mad after all?

  PART TWO

  FIVE

  Sleep, fitful sleep, finally overtook him, but even unconsciousness provided no sanctuary. His dreams were captive to memories of a far-off land. Once again, an image buckled and shimmered like a celluloid frame paused before an overheated projector bulb—and then he knew where he was.

  Changhua, Taiwan. The centuries-old town was surrounded by mountains on three sides; to the west, it faced the Taiwan Strait—the fraught hundred miles of salt water that separates the island from the mainland. Fukien emigrants first settled there in the seventeenth century, during the Ching dynasty; many waves of settlers followed. Each successive wave added its distinctive imprint, but the town itself, like some intelligent organism, decided which additions would be preserved, which lost to history. At a park at the base of the Bagua Mountains stood a massive black Buddha, guarded by two massive stone lions. Visitors gaped at the Buddha; the townsmen had almost equal regard for the lions—emblems of defense, with coiled muscles and sharp fangs. Years ago, Changhua was a major fort. Now a populous city, it had become a garrison of another sort. A garrison of democracy.

  On the outskirts of town, near a paper factory and flower farm, a makeshift platform had been assembled. The man many believed would be the next president of Taiwan, Wai-Chan Leung, was about to appea
r before a crowd of thousands. Supporters had flocked from the Tianwei and Yungjing townships along the provincial Route 1, and small, dusty cars filled every side street and alley. Never in memory had a political candidate inspired such excitement among the ordinary people of Taiwan.

  He was, in many ways, an unlikely figure. For one thing, he was much younger than most candidates: just thirty-seven years of age. He was the scion of a wealthy family, one that had merchant lineage, and yet he was a genuine populist, with a charisma that stirred the spirits of the least well off. He had founded the fastest-growing new political party in Taiwan and was personally responsible for its remarkably broad appeal. The island republic had no shortage of political parties and organizations, but Wai-Chan Leung’s party had immediately set itself apart by its clear-eyed commitment to reform. Having led successful anticorruption campaigns on the local level, Leung now asked to be given the authority to cleanse national politics, national commerce, of corruption and cronyism. Nor did his political vision end there. Whereas other candidates exploited the long-standing fear and resentment toward the “Chinese empire” represented by the mainland, Leung spoke, rather, of a “new policy toward the new China”—a policy centered on conciliation, trade, and an ideal of shared sovereignty.

  To many old China hands in the State Department, the young man sounded too good to be true. According to a dossier painstakingly compiled by Consular Operations’ Political Stabilization Unit, he was.

  That was why Ambler had been deployed at Changhua, as part of an “action team” dispatched by the Political Stabilization Unit—one of the Stab boys, in the sardonic shorthand. Which meant he was there not as Hal Ambler but as Tarquin, the field name he had been assigned since the beginning of his career in covert ops. Tarquin, he sometimes felt, was not just a persona but a person in his own right. When Ambler was in the field, he became Tarquin. It was a form of psychic compartmentalization that enabled him to do what had to be done.

  One of the very few Westerners in a sea of Asian faces—by automatic presumption, therefore, a member of the foreign media—Tarquin moved through the dense crowd, keeping his eyes peeled on the platform. At any moment, the man would appear. The great hope of Taiwan’s new generation. The youthful idealist. The charismatic visionary.