"Had to?"
"You remember my wife, Julia?"
"Sure. She fixed dinner for me at your house a time or two. Real pretty lady."
"Well, she died a little over a year ago. Cancer. I watched her gradually waste away. It was… " His voice cracked, and he swallowed hard. Just thinking of her lying there emaciated, her hair vanished, still hurt like a dagger in the heart. "On top of all the pressures at the Agency, it was just about more than I could take. I hit the bottle a bit too hard. Drew a six-month suspension and a sojourn on the dry-out farm. I don't guess I'd have made it except for Lori. She stood by me like a trouper."
Burke brought in two tall glasses of a fruit punch concoction, handed one to Quinn and sat down across from him. "This'll make you so damned healthy you probably won't be able to stand it. Say, I'm awful sorry to hear about Julia. Your daughter, Lori, I remember as a cute, perky little kid with a pony tail."
That brought an amused grin. "She's now a cute, perky big kid. How does middle thirties sound?"
"Damn. It's been that long?"
"She's a jewel. I had hoped she would make me a grandfather. She's got her mother's maternal instincts. But no such luck. She had a brief marriage, a real disaster. She's a confirmed bachelor girl now."
"What about the suspension, Cam? You in good graces now?"
Quinn took a sip of the drink and licked his lips. Not bad, but no real substitute for Scotch. "That's the sixty-four-dollar question," he said after a moment's hesitation.
He was lucky they hadn't forcibly retired him. The CIA was definitely touchy about alcohol and drug problems after the celebrated flap over Edward Lee Howard, the over-imbibing Soviet desk man who was fired and then defected to the Russians. Fortunately for Quinn, he had a close friend in Senator Barley of Maine, senior Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Barley was an irascible old curmudgeon who had once been in his father's law firm, but he was a staunch supporter of the CIA. It was an open secret that Cam's immediate superior, Hawthorne "Hawk" Elliott, chief of the counterintelligence staff, would be happy to see him nailed to the wall. Elliott had been a critic of Israel and a detractor of James Angleton. When he had moved eventually into Angleton's old slot, he made no secret of his displeasure with those who had been close to the legendary CI chief.
Hawk Elliott had finally found his opportunity and was ready to throw Quinn to the wolves when Senator Barley interceded. He prevailed on Marshall to give Quinn another chance. Although he had come from the analyst ranks, the DCI had strong feelings of loyalty to operations veterans who had devoted their lives to work in the shadows of international intrigue. Quinn had put his skin on the line in World War II and countless times over his nearly forty years with the CIA.
His reprieve was only temporary, though. The senator had announced he would not run for reelection, and Quinn knew Elliott was lurking in the wings, just waiting for him to make a misstep.
Chapter 9
Burke Hill was no stranger to the internecine warfare among government agencies. Sipping on the fruit punch, he looked across at his friend. He had known Cameron Quinn as an exceptional case officer and a fiery competitor. They had crossed paths several times when he was assigned to what was known in the FBI, though not very widely, as J. Edgar Hoover's Goon Squad. They carried out black operations of questionable legality. Some of the assignments took place outside the U. S., often infringing on the CIA's territory. Back home the Agency had been busy returning the favor by often ignoring the FBI's sole jurisdiction stateside.
The two agencies operated at arm's length in those days, as though they worked for separate governments. But after first linking up on a case in Mexico, Burke and Quinn teamed up on several operations in Europe. Unbeknownst to their superiors, of course.
He could never remember Cam looking so down, so almost broken. If there was such a thing as the odor of defeat, it would have fouled the air around him. Burke gave him a warm grin, searching a way to pump a little life back into those somber eyes. "Remember the time we first met?"
"Mexico City?"
"Yeah. I was about to feed a guy named Jorge Velasquez a little potion the lab guys out at Dugway Proving Grounds had dreamed up."
"One of my best Mexican agents," Quinn said with a chuckle. "He was a high ranking Party member."
"Hoover had decided to teach him a lesson. He'd loused up an operation of ours down there. Then I met you at that bar on the Paseo de la Reforma. You told me you'd put the guy up to it in the first place to protect his cover with the CIA."
Quinn leaned forward as though about to break up as that old bellowing laugh Burke remembered shook his sagging shoulders. "Damn, that was funny. You never told me what that stuff was you planned to give him."
"I don't know what was in it. All I know is what happened to an agent who picked up some of it out at Dugway as a courier. He got curious, best we could figure, and opened the package. They found him wandering naked through a little town near Provo a couple of days later, babbling like the village idiot. Didn't know who he was or where he'd come from. The Bureau quickly put out word he'd had a breakdown and resigned."
It required some fancy footwork to cover his rear end on the Mexico City operation, Burke recalled. Quinn persuaded his agent to lay low for a while, and they mounted a small disinformation campaign to convince Hoover that Burke had successfully put the Mexican out of commission.
"I was lucky I ran into you then," Quinn said. He finished off his punch and toyed with the glass. "As I mentioned, I had gone to a meeting in the Director's office when I saw your name under that photograph. As the conversation developed, it hit me like a lightning flash that you were the man I was looking for."
The meeting had taken place the past Monday, the day he returned from Cyprus. He had sent back a flash report through the Nicosia station, detailing the death of Ahmed Ali Nassar. It resulted in a hasty march to Marshall's seventh floor office in the company of Hawthorne Elliott and the Deputy Director for Operations, General Frederick Palmer. The Director had initiated the Jabberwock investigation a week earlier when he gave the DDO two telephone intercepts that were passed along by the National Security Agency. Some alert analyst at NSA's labyrinthine headquarters at Fort George Meade, Maryland, spotted the apparent codeword Jabberwock in two unrelated international telephone intercepts picked up three days apart. The head of his branch, a former CIA man, decided it was something the Agency might want to delve into.
After Quinn gave a firsthand account of the events on the beach at Cyprus, Kingsley Marshall turned to his deputy and the CI chief. "What do you make of it, gentlemen?"
General Palmer had only recently been named Deputy Director for Operations. Prior to that he was an intelligence staff man at the Pentagon with excellent connections on The Hill. Though well versed in military intelligence, geopolitics, national strategies, and the intricacies of top-level decision making, he had quickly learned the CIA's Clandestine Services was a whole different ball game. He deferred to his Counterintelligence chief.
"It could very well be a new Israeli move to subvert us," said Elliott, frowning. He was a cool operator who had served in CIA stations around the globe, including a stint as Moscow station chief, before assuming his present post. He had earned a reputation for being the proverbial thorn in the KGB's side. But the nickname "Hawk" was related not to his anti-communism but to his prowess as a pinpoint-passing quarterback at Princeton. The CIA recruited him just out of college during the Korean War.
"You think the Mossad would risk another Pollard affair?" General Palmer asked, referring to Jonathan Jay Pollard, a civilian intelligence analyst with the Naval Investigative Service arrested as an Israeli spy in 1985.