“Mother of God.”
Over the next thirty minutes, Denny Carmichael told Jordan Mayes everything about Gentry and the Saudi relationship to him.
Not just their service in the Violator hunt — but everything.
When Carmichael finished, his second-in-command looked out the window to the southwest. A thick bank of clouds grew low, gray, and ominous, approaching like a wall closing in on Washington, D.C. After a moment Mayes just said, “Jesus Christ, Denny.”
Carmichael kept his eyes on Mayes’s face. “Of course, you see the problem here.”
Mayes nodded distractedly. Then, “Of course I do. Why didn’t you—”
Carmichael interrupted. “Anything I did or did not do is all water under the bridge now, isn’t it? Could I have managed this better from the beginning? Absolutely. I acknowledge that. But you see I had to make a series of on-the-fly critical decisions. Some I got right. A great many, as a matter of fact, but they have been eclipsed in importance by the very few decisions I got wrong.”
He shrugged. “And here we are today. You are now in the fold, and I need to know that I can count on you for the good of the future of this Agency.”
Mayes finally looked away from the window and towards his superior. “You just told me all this so I would know the stakes.”
“I just told you because you asked me to tell you.”
“Bullshit. If I turn and walk away, you’ll send Hightower or someone else to term me.”
Carmichael’s face was impassive. “Of course not. Jordan. That’s ludicrous. We’ve been together for twenty-five years.”
“We have… and that’s the first time you’ve ever called me Jordan.” He stood and headed for the door on shaky legs.
Carmichael followed him. “You walk out on this and you know what this will do to the Clandestine Service. You have to see this through now. Court Gentry must die, because if he reveals what he knows, our human intelligence operations will be set back a generation.”
Mayes thought about everything Carmichael had just told him. It was true. Right or wrong — and right now this all seemed so fucking wrong — Gentry had to be terminated. If not, Carmichael’s assertion that CIA covert HUMINT would suffer for a generation seemed, if anything, like an understatement.
He said, “This is a lot to take in, Denny. I just need to go home. I just need to think.”
Carmichael’s severe face hardened even more. Mayes had never seen colder eyes in his life.
Carmichael said, “Think all you want, Mayes. But do your thinking alone, and in silence.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, and he left through the door to the narrow hallway, passing DeRenzi and his men without a word.
64
The café on Tel Aviv’s King George Street offered outdoor seating that afforded a nice view of Meir Garden, but Mossad officer Yanis Alvey wasn’t taking in the view. He sipped his espresso at a small table outside, but mostly he just sat there, looking at nothing and no one. A smoky bus thumped by, and other patrons at the tables around recoiled or covered their noses.
Alvey just ignored it, lost in his melancholy.
The sun had set an hour earlier, and the evening air cooled more and more each minute. Alvey wore a short-sleeve shirt with a light cashmere vest over it, not enough to ward off the April breeze, but he wasn’t thinking about the cool air, either.
He sensed movement in front of him and he looked up in time to see a middle-aged brunette with a small backpack hanging off her shoulder standing at the foot of his little bistro table. For an instant he thought she looked familiar, but he could not place her. She looked down at him, though, like she knew him well.
An uncomfortable feeling for an intelligence officer, to be sure, especially when he recognized the person, but he did not know from where.
“Mr. Alvey?” she asked.
English. That caused him to refine his hunt to put a name to the face. A name was on the tip of his tongue for an instant, and then it melted off. No.
“Who are you?” he asked. Refusing to confirm his ID before getting more information.
“My name is Catherine King. I am with the Washington Post.”
Instantly he knew exactly who she was; he’d seen her on television, and he’d read hundreds of columns she’d written over the years. He began to stand to leave. His eyes flickered all around, hunting for a suitable escape route.
“Please wait. Sit down with me a moment. I’m not going to ask you anything. Not yet, anyway. I need to tell you something. After I tell you, if you like, you can get up and walk away, and I promise I will not pursue you.”
Alvey kept the nervous furtive eyes, but he lowered back to his seat.
The waiter came and she ordered an espresso. Alvey declined her offer to buy him another.
Soon she said, “A mutual acquaintance of ours told me this story. It’s a good one. I speak to liars with depressing regularity, but I believe this man believes what he is saying. That doesn’t make it true, mind you. I’m just letting you know I am normally quite skeptical of tall tales.”
“Who is the acquaintance?”
“He wouldn’t give me his name, but you know who he is.”
Alvey smiled. Bemused. “Without his name, I highly doubt that. I know a lot of men.”
“Yes, but how many of them shot you in the stomach in a Hamburg stairwell?”
Alvey measured his breathing carefully. Intent on not giving any of his emotions away. “Not so many.”
“I presumed as much. Well, this man is in serious trouble. He thinks just maybe you might be able to help him.”
The muscles in Yanis Alvey’s neck twitched. “Help him, Ms. King? Help him? If he were sitting where you are sitting right now, I would dive across this table with this butter knife and stab it through his heart. I don’t want to help him. I want to kill him.”
Catherine King had not expected this at all. “But why?”
“Because he is a bad and dangerous individual. Dangerous to my nation, the nation I have sworn to protect with my life. Yes, I helped this man in the past, but that was before I knew the truth.”
“He tells me he is innocent,” she said, her voice unsure now. Then she said, “Why would he send me all the way over here to prove he was innocent if he wasn’t?”
Alvey seemed to think this over for a moment. Finally he nodded. Said, “The reason is obvious. He has no idea what he has done.”
“Will you tell me?”
“Why should I talk to a reporter?”
“Because I have information, too, Mr. Alvey. Perhaps you are curious. And perhaps… the both of us can piece some things together that might be interesting.”
Alvey looked away. “I’m not curious at all.”
King persisted. “You have seen the news from Washington. Our mutual friend is the one at the center of this. The one being blamed for everything. Perhaps you think he’s done something wrong, and that’s why you would wring his neck if you got the chance, but can you really say you believe he is crisscrossing D.C. on a mass murder spree?”
Alvey looked back to the woman from the Post. “No. I don’t believe he would do that.”
“Then the CIA is after the wrong man. If you can help them with your information, wouldn’t you? Together maybe we can figure this out.”
Slowly Alvey stood from the table. Catherine thought he was going to walk away without another word, but instead he surprised her. “We can take my car. We will talk while we drive. A running meet, we call it. A café like this is not safe for such stories. Not even stories from long ago.”